New Title 2

Johnny Pharaoh

“I’m afraid there’s been a terrible mistake.”

The man seated on the edge of the bed looked up at the person who had just opened the door to his room. It was like a private hospital room, clean and sterile, with a VT/comp on a little table and a single window. Shortly after awakening, the man on the bed had gone over to part that window’s curtains and gaze outside, just to be sure he at least recognized the city he was in.

He had felt relief to see he was still in the megalopolis of Paxton, an Earth-based colony on the planet Oasis more commonly spoken of as Punktown. He loved this damn city. He associated it with a quote from Dante: “Now son, the City of Dis (Satan) draws near, with its grave citizens.” Hell right, City of Dis. He’d been reassured by the familiar skyline of buildings seemingly packed into one solid body, an ocean of structures as far as the eye could see, some of them soaring so high they vanished in a golden morning haze. Yes, it was morning, and the man on the bed could detect the alluring scent of coffee through the doorway framing his visitor, whose white lab coat hung open to show the expensive street clothes beneath. This visitor could easily afford expensive clothes, even though he was not a licensed doctor. And this was only like a private hospital room. The man on the bed understood that much, at least.

“I’ll say there’s been a terrible mistake,” he growled. He hated the sound of his own voice—if it could be called his own voice. The words he had just uttered should have been a deep, ominous rumble from a chest wider than the threshold that lab-smocked doctor wannabe was hovering in (as if afraid to step fully into the wannabe hospital room). His voice should be like a tiger’s warning rumble, a tiger with chunks of gravel grating in its throat. But this voice…to him it sounded like a librarian irritated that a book was being returned a week late.

Mr. Lab Smock ventured a few steps into the room; maybe the weakness of that voice had put him at ease a bit. “I take it the technician told you where you are, Mr. Phillips.”

“Don’t call me that!” The man on the bed rose to his feet, expecting to tower over the doctor wannabe. Instead, he found himself a few inches shorter. “My name is Johnny Pharaoh! I told your blasting tech that!”

“But did he tell you…”

“He didn’t tell me where I am—I sent that worm running for his mommy—but I’ve figured it out for myself. I’m in the Phoenix Clinic. Illegal cloning facility.”

The lab-coated man seemed to wince at the unsavory word “illegal.” “Yes, yes, the Phoenix Clinic, that’s correct. You’ve been here before…ah, Mr. Pharaoh.”

“Obviously, since you had my memories on file. And my body, too. So why aren’t they together? What are my memories doing in this sad scrap of flesh?” He thumped his bony chest through the orange jumpsuit they had dressed the fresh clone in. The thump hurt him, hurt this body that mocked him. Good. He’d like to torture it, dismember it—if he could only get his mind outside of it first.

“Well, sir, there was a mix-up, as embarrassing and unprofessional as that sounds. A human error. The body of John Phillips was cloned—that’s, um, the body you’re in right now—but the wrong file was accessed and input, via a brain drip of memory-encoded long-chain molecules in the process that I’m sure someone described to you when you stored your materials at our facility two years ago. Our files are alphabetical. John Phillips…John Pharaoh.” The man chuckled uncomfortably, as if he hoped Johnny would appreciate the humor in it.

“I see you screen your employees well. And speaking of incompetents, what’s your name, Dr. Frankenstein?”

“Oh, so sorry…I’m Alvarez, Richard Alvarez.” Alvarez extended his hand. His face flickered when he saw Johnny glare at the appendage as if he had just opened up his fly to expose himself, and he dropped his hand back to his side. “Ah, in any case, what we need to do now is…”

“So how did I die?” Johnny interrupted. Was it the skirmishing with the Neptune Teeb Family, Punktown’s most powerful syndicate? Or had that thing with the Ng Yueh-sheng Triad escalated into something serious? Or was it some new conflict that had occurred in the two years since he had left his memory file here, and the tissues from which his body was to be illegally cloned in the event of an untimely demise? Probably the Teeb conflict, he figured; that had been why he’d thought to pay all that credit to have himself put on file at this hush-hush clinic in the first place.

“Ah, well, that’s just it, sir. You didn’t die.”

“Pardon?”

“You, John Pharaoh, didn’t die. John Phillips died. He’s a stock market consultant, who perished in a shuttle accident while returning to Oasis from a conference at Port Haven station. So we successfully resurrected his body, according to his contract with us…but again, it’s just that the wrong file was pulled for his memories.”

“So I’m not dead. I, being Johnny Pharaoh.”

“That’s correct. You’re still alive, out there somewhere in the city. You…um, that is, the actual John Pharaoh, hasn’t been made aware of this mix-up.”

“The actual John Pharaoh,” Johnny muttered, in echo.

“And really, there is no need to alert him. It’s a matter that can be rectified easily enough.”

Johnny paced over to the VT/comp, which showed only a swirling screen saver pattern now, but when he had first awakened in this room and realized that the body he occupied was—wrong—he had activated the device’s vidphone feature, and then set the screen to MIRROR mode, so that he could see himself as would a person he might make a call to.

The face he had stared at, the face that had stared back at him, was that of a stranger. Thin-cheeked, artificially tanned, with his black hair neatly cut by the Quality Control staff that had put the finishing touches to the clone. No sandy-gray crewcut, no heavy square jaw, no neck as thick as another man’s thigh. He didn’t have to unzip the orange jumpsuit (so like the jumpsuits he had worn in various prisons over the course of his career) and inspect this scrawny scarecrow’s body to know that he no longer wore, tattooed here and there across his chest and back, menacing incantations from such books as the Necronomicon, its Kalian equivalent the Fizala, the Atlas of Chaos and the Veins of the Old Ones, assembled by a Choom author and a Tikkihotto author respectively. (Each sinister quote had a number beside it, which corresponded with a footnote giving the quote’s source—these footnotes tattooed on the tops and bottoms of his feet.) There would be no tattoo at the base of his spine, just above his buttocks, reading: “Abandon every hope, you who enter here,” from Dante’s The Divine Comedy. And this little office drone would probably consider himself daring if he pierced one earlobe, let alone had metal spikes implanted into the knuckles of one hand as Johnny Pharaoh had done.

“Rectified how? I can see if all you had to do was clone my real body, and put my memories in there instead. But now you tell me my…my original self isn’t even dead. Which makes two of me.”

“Well, what we must do, you see, is scrub the memory from this body, and implant the memories of its actual owner, John Phillips.”

Johnny turned around slowly, away from staring into the mesmerizing and dizzying vortex of the screen saver. “Say what?”

“I said, we’ll need to erase the improperly implanted memories, and replace them with the appropriate file.”

“You want to scrub my mind? Erase me?”

Again, that uneasy chuckle from Alvarez. “Well, sir, you know that’s not your body.”

“No dung it isn’t my body.”

“And you know that you’re not dead. John Pharaoh isn’t dead.”

“Yeah.”

“So, it’s redundant and unnecessary to leave your memories inside this body. Mr. Phillips has paid for this procedure, and we really can’t be generating another clone for him when we’ve already got one prepared. And not only that, but I’m sure the actual John Pharaoh would be quite unhappy to find that we activated his memories, his identity, without his having died.”

“I’m not asking you to leave me inside this bastard. I’m asking…dung, man. You stupid, stupid sons of bitches. I guess that’s the only thing—you’re gonna have to clone my real body, and transfer my memories into that, instead.”

“Well…see…we can’t do that. I told you, Mr. Pharaoh is alive. Okay, look, you feel like you’re you—that is, you’re a conscious entity, with a sense of your own identity—but you see, even if we erased you out of this body, and dripped your memories into the appropriate cloned body of John Pharaoh, that would become a third conscious entity, a third version of the same identity. This entity that you are right now, that would cease to exist anyway! So whether we make a correct clone of John Pharaoh or just scrub your current brain and input the mind of John Phillips, the result will be the same. This you that you’re experiencing now—this version of your consciousness—it will be gone.”

Johnny plopped down onto the edge of the narrow bed again and took his unfamiliar head into his too-delicate, womanly hands. “Ohhh, man…you sorry sons of bitches.”

“Well, yes, we are sorry,” Alvarez tried to joke.

Johnny sprang to his feet, had the man around the throat and pinned to the wall before Alvarez could even produce a flinch. He even managed to slide Alvarez’s body up the wall, but he had to use both arms and all his strength to do it. Through gritted teeth, he snarled, “This is no blasting joke, you piece of dung!”

“No…no…of course not!” Alvarez rasped, his feet dangling like those of a lynched man.

Johnny let him drop, slide down the wall into a puddle of lab smock. “Then you’re just gonna have to leave me in this body, then. If scrubbing me from Phillips and putting my memories into a real clone of me makes this me disappear, then I’m just gonna have to accept this as the new me. And you’re just gonna have to make that little office termite another copy of his body. You want money to pay for his new clone? I’ll give you the money for his new clone.”

Holding his neck, rising unsteadily to his feet, Alvarez stammered, “But I’m telling you, sir, it isn’t just that! Our client, the actual John Pharaoh, would be less than pleased, I’m sure, to know there were now essentially two of him.”

“I know him better than you. He wouldn’t want to see me wiped out of existence any more than he’d want to see a twin brother killed.”

“We’ll have to phone him, then.”

“So phone him.”

“Very well…we’ll do that right away. But we’ll need to honor his wishes, whatever they are.” Alvarez moved swiftly to the door. “I’ll be right back.”

“While you’re at it, get me some of that coffee I smell.”

“My brother doesn’t like coffee.”

A woman had just stepped into the door’s threshold, blocking Alvarez’s escape.

“Then your brother’s even more pathetic than I thought,” grumbled Johnny, taking the woman in. She bore a resemblance to John Phillips, but the slender frame, dark skin, black hair worked much, much better in this configuration. She wore an ash gray business suit, the skirt clinging tightly to nicely-curved hips, and her silvery satin blouse was unbuttoned two buttons too many. Her eyes were cold. Johnny liked that in a woman. Much sexier than fawning doe eyes, sweet and sticky as candy. Eyes as cold as the first swallow of beer on a hellishly hot day in the city of Punktown. Yes.

“I’ve heard most of this fiasco already, but I can’t believe what I heard just now. You don’t want to give my brother’s body up.”

“Possession is nine-tenths of the law, sister. And between the body and mind, I think the mind takes precedence. I’m more me than I am him.”

“Obviously, since my brother isn’t some kind of low-caste gangster and philosopher wannabe, as you appear to be. Look, I came here to make sure this procedure went smoothly, and I’ve already got a belly full of chewed ass. Am I going to have to chew yours, too?”

“Only if I can tongue yours.” Johnny gave something like the lop-sided smirk he had always used on women in the past. But it didn’t seem to go over as well, when this woman saw it on the face of her brother.

“Ugh,” was all she could retort.

“I’ll go make that call to Mr. Pharaoh,” Alvarez cut in. “Ah, Ms. Phillips, would you care to come with me?”

“Go call this thug’s double; I’ll stay here.”

“Ah, I really think you should come with me until we can…”

“I said I’ll stay here. I wanna try talking some sense into this ape.”

“Er…very well.” Looking reluctant, Alvarez ducked out into the hall and closed the door after himself, leaving the woman and her brother’s body alone together.

“What’s your name, sister?” Johnny asked her.

“Mara.”

“You’re beautiful when you’re angry, Mara. I guess I’m gonna see you get even more beautiful now, huh?”

“You’re going to see me become the most beautiful woman of all time.”

“You’re well on your way already.”

“Don’t try to sweet-talk me, dung-hole. Listen, you know you’re not really you. And you’re not really my brother, either. So why don’t you just give it up and let these idiots work it all out the way it’s supposed to be?”

“If I’m not really me, then when your brother’s properly cloned he won’t really be him—right? I know you don’t believe that, or you wouldn’t be so intent on getting him cloned. So how can you expect me to just let these people scrub me out of existence?”

“The key difference here is that my brother is dead. The original is gone, blown to bits. But your original is out there, still breathing.”

“I’ve been through this with Frankenstein, there. I’m telling you like I told him—I’m alive, too. I don’t care if my so-called original is out there. I feel as much like me as I ever did. Yeah, he’s got the real flesh and two years worth of memories more than I do, but I’m every bit as much me as he is. Why should I let myself be destroyed? Exterminated? To make you happy? To make that other Johnny Pharaoh happy? I don’t think so. I want to stay alive, sister.”

“You’re a moron.”

“Yeah? And you wouldn’t feel the same in my shoes? Though these shoes are like five sizes smaller than what I’m used to. Anyway, I know myself. I don’t think the other Johnny is gonna have a problem with this. With me, at least. But I’ll bet he’ll want to chew some ass here at Phoenix…chew it up worse than you could ever hope to do.”

Mara Phillips sighed. She started to pace the small antiseptic room, her high heels clacking importantly on its polished floor. “Okay, look, I see your point and I understand where you’re at. But can you see how crazy this all is?”

“Of course I can! And I’m madder about it than you are, sister.”

“Don’t call me that. I’m not your sister.”

“Ah, exactly! Look, I’ll pay for a second clone of your brother. You’ll get him back. So what do you lose, really? You know? If it makes you feel weird that there’ll be another guy out there who looks like your brother, don’t worry…I’m gonna be doing some serious body-building, and this office boy haircut has got to go. Then it’s off to my favorite tattoo parlor.”

“You’re something else,” Mara sighed again.

He stepped in her path, blocking her pacing. “So are you. What do you say we go to breakfast? Okay, this probably won’t be settled quick enough for that, but let’s make it dinner instead.”

“You don’t really expect me to say yes.”

“Why don’t I?”

There was a beep behind him, from the VT/comp. Johnny turned toward the computer and saw Alvarez’s face on its screen.

“There’s a call for you, sir. I’ll put it through.”

Alvarez’s face was replaced by a much more familiar one, the face Johnny had hoped to see when he’d put the video screen into mirror mode. This countenance was older, more brutal in contour and aspect, the blue eyes steely under bony brows, one of which had little spiky studs implanted in it. Johnny Pharaoh.

“Hey, pal,” Johnny joked, approaching the monitor. “Good to see you.”

“Listen, whoever you are or think you are,” rumbled the head on the screen, in a voice like a tiger gargling gravel. “There’s been a major screw-up and I want it fixed. You aren’t me and you know it.”

“Hey, listen,” Johnny said.

“No, I told you to listen. You aren’t supposed to exist, you blasting freak. You are not me, and I’m not letting you walk out of there to mess up my life. You think you’re gonna spend my money? Elbow into my work? Sleep with my women? I don’t think so.”

“I’ll go to another planet, then! Earth or something!”

“The hell you will. You’re done, freak. I told those incompetents there to wipe you out and stick that suit’s mind in that bag of bones where it belongs. And I’m coming down there right now just to make sure the job gets done right.”

“You son of a bitch, will you listen to me?” Johnny roared, bunching his little fists.

“Sorry, freak—nothing more to say, except you’d better be gone already when I get there or I’ll wipe you out myself.” And with that, the computer beeped again and the swirly clouds of screen saver color returned. The head of Johnny Pharaoh had vanished.

“You miserable dung-eating son of a whore!” Johnny shouted at the dead screen. “When I get my hands on you I’ll pull your blasting heart out of your ass!”

“Don’t you just hate yourself?” Mara Phillips quipped. “Well, I’m sorry, Mr. Pharaoh—you have your own crude charm, I suppose, and I’ll admit I almost considered taking you up on that dinner offer, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, now.”

Johnny looked over at her. “You were?” he said, surprised. Distracted from his fury.

The door to the room opened, and in walked first one, then a second, then a third man, none of whom were the white-smocked Alvarez, but all of whom carried a gun. Johnny Pharaoh knew his guns, and saw that there was a make of revolver called a Decimator .220 (he himself preferred the much more powerful, cannon-like .340 model) and a semiautomatic Wolff .45. There was even an assault engine, a bulky two-fisted weapon that could fire solid rounds in fully automatic mode, shotgun shells from another muzzle, gel capsules filled with corrosive plasma, a variety of beams, and even mini-rockets. The men were security, wearing identical shiny black business suits and identical tough-guy expressions like clone wannabes.

Johnny smirked at them. Just three? Alvarez obviously didn’t know him very well.

“You wanna come with us, sir?” the tough-guy with the assault engine droned.

“You boys got no heart. Not even one stinking cup of coffee before I go?”

“Sorry, sir. You need to come with us—now.”

Peripherally, Johnny took in everything in the room around him, mapping it in one instant sweep. Over the years, through training and improvisation, he had found that almost anything loose could be used as a weapon. A rolled up magazine stabbed into the Adam’s apple. A coffee mug smashed into the bridge of a nose. He had once killed two guys on hoverbikes, ripping the helmet off the head of one guy and swinging it into the unhelmeted head of the second guy, crushing his sorry skull. Then he had dragged the first guy off his bike, and stomped his head against the edge of the curb. They didn’t like him cutting them off in traffic? Sorry. But they shouldn’t have followed him into a parking lot, afterward, to confront him. Who was the tough-guy now?

“Sir?” said the security man, motioning with his assault engine.

“Whatcha gonna do, pump this poor woman’s nicely cloned brother full of holes?”

Not only was Johnny keenly aware of his surroundings in terms of potential weapons and fighting environment, but he was conscious of Mara Phillips’ position in the room. He mustn’t let her get hit by any stray bullets or rays. Beautiful or not, he had never liked innocent bystanders getting caught in the crossfire. Unprofessional, and just plain not nice.

“He said let’s go, freak!” barked the security boy with the big revolver, showing his teeth.

“I’m getting pretty tired of being called freak,” Johnny said mildly, as if his feelings had been hurt. He looked around at Mara. “So, I guess I’ll have to catch you another time. But we’ll have that dinner sooner or later, trust me.”

He put his hand on her shoulder—and then shoved her down, using one leg to sweep her shapely nylon-sheathed legs out from under her. She hadn’t even hit the floor (he hated bruising those soft curves) before he was spinning around to confront the three Phoenix Clinic security grunts, reaching out to push the assault engine away from pointing in his direction. Bullets began to chatter from it as the grunt pulled back reflexively on one of its triggers, the spray cutting through the space where Mara would have been standing and continuing in an arc until the slugs struck the guy with the Wolff .45.

Hm—Johnny found he was faster, bouncier on his feet, in this less bulky body. And though its far less powerful muscles didn’t remember how to fight, to kill, Johnny Pharaoh’s mind remembered those skills as well as ever, and that was all that mattered.

The guy hit with the last of the automatic spray jerked horribly in the air, blood erupting from his back in little jets that defaced the room’s stark whiteness, before someone snipped his marionette strings and he crumpled.

Still holding onto the assault engine with his left hand, Johnny grabbed the young punk by the lapel and swung him around in front of him just as the toughie with the Decimator fired. Johnny ducked down a little and squinted as two slugs from the revolver tore through the body of his human shield. Holding onto the guy, Johnny felt his frame jolt with the impacts.

There—just a nice little pause, but a pause nonetheless, as Decimator boy realized in horror that he’d just killed his surly girlfriend. It was all Johnny needed. There hadn’t been any loose items to use as weapons, really, aside from the VT/comp, so he’d decided to use their weapons instead. With the hand already resting on it, he tore away the assault engine and with his other hand shoved the standing dead man straight toward Decimator boy. Swinging the gun up into both fists and crouching, Johnny let loose a thundering shotgun blast, pumped the slide, launched a second spray of OO buckshot.

Straight through the already-pierced body of assault engine guy, and into the body of Mr. Decimator. Both of them thumped, shredded and lifeless, to the floor. The wall exposed by their fallen bodies was pocked with holes and splashed with vivid, running gore. Well, the boring little room had been in need of some decorating.

Johnny knelt, retrieved the Decimator and then the Wolff, tucked the guns as best he could into the pockets of the jumpsuit, then paused in the recovery room’s open doorway on his way out to cast a smirk back at Mara, huddled and whimpering on the floor.

“You take care, sister.”

Mara glanced up timidly, her cold eyes now streaming tears like melting ice cubes, to see her brother John standing there with blood speckled across his chest, a massive gun cradled in his arms, and an entirely alien gleam in his eyes. And then, he was gone—out of the room and off down the hallway.

“Be careful, you stupid piece of dung,” she muttered.

Trotting down the corridor, Johnny tried to remember from coming here two years ago which floor in this business structure the Phoenix Clinic was on. He pictured the view of his beloved, ugly city as seen from the recovery room’s window. Tenth, maybe? A floor or two less than that? The corridor turned to the right ahead. He came to a stop at its edge, then swung around and came face-to-face with Alvarez and a fourth security man in a shimmering black suit. There couldn’t be many more of these grunts. This one had a semiautomatic in one fist, and he hadn’t even got it half raised before Johnny put a bright beam through him like a spear made of blue crystal. It left a scorched and smoking hole in his forehead, and there would be a corresponding hole in the rear of his skull. He fell back against the wall, eyes still open in an expression half quizzical and half lobotomized, and slumped sideways to the floor. As Alvarez began to whirl away with a yelp, Johnny called, “Hold it, Frankenstein.”

Alvarez turned back to face him as Johnny walked quickly down the hall. “Please, please, Mr. Pharaoh,” he began.

“Oh, now I’m Mr. Pharaoh, huh? No more Mr. Phillips?”

“You can take my car; it’s in the garage below the building.”

“Good idea, and you’re coming with me.” Johnny took one hand off the assault engine to grab a fistful of lab smock.

“No, please…look, I’ll give you the password…”

“I said you’re coming with me. Which way out of this place?”

“Um, that way—to the elevators.”

“Great. Let’s go.” Johnny tugged the man along. His force of will gave his lean body more strength than it possessed and he almost jerked the man right off his feet. As they walked down the corridor side-by-side, Johnny said, “I see you eyeballing the guns in my pockets. You make a grab for one of those and they’ll be cloning you next, doc. I’m sure you’ve got a file here, yourself, so maybe you’re not worried about that.”

“I won’t, I won’t…I don’t want to die.”

“Now you know how it feels, dung-breath. So—did you already call the forcers?”

“Wh-what?”

“That means you did. Good move. Well, I’ve fought my way through forcers before.”

An office door cracked open and a tech peeked out, but when Johnny wheeled with the assault engine the door closed promptly. Similarly, when they turned another corner and came to a pair of elevators, two techs in lab coats fled before boarding the open lift on the right. Johnny pushed Alvarez inside it, keeping a hold on his coat lest he try to close the door between them. He punched the key for the basement/garage level. He hated boxing himself inside an elevator—could be a death trap—but with the mock doc in tow he felt more secure.

“Once you have my vehicle you’ll let me go, right?”

“Sure, doc—no hard feelings. Just don’t try anything tricky and I won’t take your head off at the shoulders.”

The elevator descended swiftly, and the coppery door slid open with a little ding. Johnny held Alvarez ahead of him, again making use of a human shield. He heard sirens from somewhere, but that wasn’t unusual in Punktown and he hoped they weren’t headed to this business structure, specifically.

The basement garage had subdued lighting and a low ceiling supported by thick pillars of faux marble, the marble different colors for different parking zones; red pillars with silver veins close by, blue pillars with gold veins further ahead. “I’m in the Yellow Section,” Alvarez informed him. Johnny could see the black-veined yellow pillars, as big around as huge oaks, on beyond the Blue Section. He drove his hostage on between rows of parked hovercars, wheeled vehicles, helicars, hoverbikes. Several people entering or emerging from their street craft looked over, saw that complex cannon in Johnny’s grip, and ducked behind them out of sight or locked themselves inside and scrunched down in their seats.

“See how smart all these other people are? So why did you have to screw with me?”

“I’m not screwing with you! I’m cooperating, Mr. Pharaoh, aren’t I?”

“You’re a slow learner.”

Johnny thought he glimpsed a peripheral movement, whirled toward a fat pillar, finger curled on the lead-spraying trigger. No doubt another spooked business-suited man or woman, but there might still be some Phoenix security grunts on his tail. Those guys were slow learners, too.

They were almost out of the Blue Section now, a forest of petrified trees, the Yellow Section just ahead. Again, from the tail of his eye Johnny saw someone dash behind one of those gold-glittering blue columns. This time, he had caught a better look of the person, as quick as the glimpse had been.

Alvarez was pointing. “That’s it right there—my car. The gray Warper.”

“Mm-hm,” Johnny said, sounding a bit distracted.

They came up on the vehicle, smallish and sporty, parked just inside the Yellow Section, nuzzled up near one of the black-veined saffron-bright columns. Alvarez produced a remote device, pointing it at the car as he thumbed a password on its keys. A beep announced that the alarm was deactivated and the Warper was unlocked. Alvarez then turned to hand the device over to his captor. “Here, take it. The password to get her started is…”

Ignoring him, Johnny spun just as the figure lunged at him from behind that yellow column. He pressed the trigger for fully automatic fire, but the other man was fast despite his bulk and pushed the assault engine to point away from him, the chain of bullets strafing across the pillar with thwarted whines. A ricochet pinged off the gray ceramic hide of the expensive Warper.

Johnny ducked under the blow that swung toward his head, faster even than this muscled giant. He let go of one handle of the assault engine to free his right hand, and popped up after the missed punch to shoot a blow at his attacker’s head, knowing that was the only part of him that was really vulnerable. He knew this man wore a light but tough padded vest of body armor, and inside the lining of that heavy leather coat would be a layer of mesh that could resist most ray beams and solid rounds. Though his fist did not have spikes implanted in its knuckles, as did the one that had been thrown at him, he scored a nice sharp blow to the man’s left temple.

Still gripping the side of the assault engine, the bigger man wrenched at it now, jerked it out of Johnny’s grasp. Johnny let it go, but that freed him entirely. He dropped down close to the ground, and threw himself at the man’s legs, almost as big around as columns themselves. He grabbed at the side of one of the tall, steel-toed boots. The other boot rose in a kick to the ribs that dislodged Johnny, knocked all the air out of his lungs. He flew backward onto his side with a grunt.

“You pathetic little scumbag,” rumbled the giant, reversing the assault engine in his hands so that now it was his turn to point its multiple barrels. “So you were gonna ventilate me, huh? And take my place? I don’t think so.”

Johnny had curled in a tight fetus position, his ribs feeling shattered, moaning. He mumbled something incoherently.

“Say what, freak?” demanded the real Johnny Pharaoh. He stepped closer, looming over his defeated clone. This pitiful imposter, this inadequate pretender, who must weigh less even than his shadow.

On the ground, Johnny mumbled again. “Not my fault,” and some other slurred babbling.

The real Johnny cocked the slide of the shotgun feature. “Quick and merciful, dung-hole. Just to show you I’m not all bad. But you should know that, huh?”

Since when had he become so stupid, Johnny wondered about himself, that he would let down his guard and chit-chat with a wounded enemy? Had the last two years made the real Johnny Pharaoh senile?

He came out of his coiled-up posture like a cobra, in his right fist the combat knife he had stolen from the sheath in the real Johnny’s boot. He had known it would be there, as always. He returned it to the real Johnny, but instead of sticking the blade in its scabbard he buried it in Johnny’s thigh, and then gave its handle a sharp twist. The real Johnny let out a roar of pain, so high above him that it sounded like an angry god.

The real Johnny fired a shotgun blast at the spot where the clone had been, but he was no longer there, having scrambled forward on hands and knees like a crab. Johnny switched his finger to another trigger, the automatic fire feature, as he spun in the direction the clone had scrambled. But the clone had already sprung to his feet, ignoring the agony in his side, and let loose a flurry of blows directed at the authentic Johnny’s head. The clone knew enough not to split his knuckles, though, on those spiky studs implanted in one of the giant’s bony eyebrows.

Between the pain and damage in his gored leg, and the stunning barrage of blows to his heavy skull, Johnny Pharaoh collapsed. His fall was as ponderous as that of a felled tree. The clone stayed with him, both his hands now clawing to get that assault engine back. Though only partly conscious now, the real Johnny wouldn’t let go. Half straddling him, the clone reached back and tugged free the combat knife. He heard the giant groan beneath him. If he wouldn’t let go of the gun, maybe he’d just hack at his hands until he did.

But why not just end it first, and then take the gun? The clone raised the knife high above the neck of the dazed man beneath him. The former Johnny Pharaoh.

His arm froze there in the air, at the height of its arc. A drop of blood gathered and dripped from the tip of the blade as if from a leaky faucet, plopping on the groaning giant’s cheek. The new Johnny felt his weak arms trembling from the pain in his side. He felt his fragile knuckles ache from the blows he had delivered to that massive skull. Peripherally, he saw Alvarez sprinting off between the rows of vehicles, leaving his unlocked Warper behind him. Despite these sensations and movements, however, it was as though time had stood still. This moment preserved in a jar of formaldehyde, frozen in a cryogenic state. Like the limbo his tissues and his mind had waited in separately for two years, to be reactivated, called out of the past. Summoned to life like a genie from its bottle.

He could not do it. He could not bring the knife down into the giant’s neck.

“You’re getting slow,” panted Johnny Pharaoh. “You stupid son of a bitch.”

And that was when the emerald green beam from a forcer’s weapon struck Johnny Pharaoh in the back of his head. It emerged through his forehead. With a look on his too-thin, overly-tanned face that was half quizzical and half lobotomized, he collapsed upon the body of the giant like a lover.

Beneath him, the original Johnny Pharaoh smelled something burning. It smelled like burnt fat or singed hair. He heard the faintest of sizzling sounds. Giving another long groan, he managed to get his pummeled eyes open enough to see two law enforcers standing over him, black-garbed and helmeted and both carrying a small, compact type of assault engine. The two men were arguing.

“You might have called a warning before you fired, y’know.”

“I didn’t have time! He was gonna stab this guy.”

“Yeah? Looked like he was hesitating, to me.”

“Why take the chance?”

“And how do you know this guy didn’t deserve to get himself stabbed?” This forcer gave Johnny a light tick in the side with the toe of his boot. “Anyway, we need a med unit here. The little guy messed this one up pretty good.”

Johnny let his bruising eyelids drift closed again.

When he opened them next, he was staring up at the bright white ceiling of a little recovery room, presumably in one of Punktown’s hospitals. He’d been a patient in all of them at one time or another. Johnny Pharaoh had been shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, even poisoned a number of times over his long career. But here he was, opening his eyes to a new day, as always. Johnny Pharaoh was a survivor.

“Oh…mama,” he moaned, sitting up in bed. A supernova of pain exploded inside his skull, and his leg that had been stabbed was bandaged and numb. Still, he swung his legs off the side of the bed and gingerly attempted putting his weight on it. It bravely upheld his body. He started stiffly toward a closet where he expected his clothing and belongings to have been stored.

But his movements had alerted hospital staff. A nurse burst into the room, followed by two men in black uniforms. It was the pair of forcers who had responded to the scene in the parking garage, minus their helmets and assault engines.

“Whoa, whoa, back into bed, big fella,” said the nurse, putting a restraining hand on his chest. She was extremely cute, the white of her uniform contrasting nicely with the rich brown hue of her skin and clinging to some impressive curves. He might have asked her to go out to dinner with him tonight if he weren’t in such a hurry to get out of this place.

“I’m okay, sister. Time to check out.”

“Not so fast, Mr. Pharaoh,” said the older of the two forcers. “I’m Officer Nguyen, and this is my partner Medina—the one who shot your assailant. We have a lot of questions.”

“I’ll swing by the station and fill you in, after I’m feeling a little better,” grumbled Johnny, eyes on the closet.

“Ah, you aren’t going anywhere, sir,” cut in Medina. “See, we called in a team to investigate this mess and it seems that you and your dance partner, there, are both clients of an unlicensed cloning facility in that building. I’m sure you know that cloning is restricted to the manufacture of labor drones.”

“I don’t know anything about any cloning facility.”

“No? The investigating officers have already got a confession out of a guy named Alvarez, who’s cooperating in return for leniency. He told our boys about the mix-up…you and that clone with your memories in it.”

Johnny Pharaoh sighed and shifted his body to glower at the two smaller men. “Okay—so I used an illegal cloning facility. Fine me.”

“It isn’t that easy,” Medina went on. “See, that clone with your memories killed four security guards while trying to escape the building.”

“You’re lucky it was only four.” Johnny felt a touch of odd pride. Even in that runty little body, his double had made a pretty good effort. Hell, he could have even killed him if he’d really wanted to. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t been able to do it. It made Johnny feel something in addition to the weird pride. Something almost like fondness for the poor bastard.

“That guy had your mind, your memories, right? He was you. So…”

“Medina,” warned the other officer.

Medina ignored him. “So, you’re the one responsible for those dead security guards, right?”

“Pardon?”

“You’re responsible. A—you’re the one who utilized that illegal clinic’s services; that clone mix-up would never have happened if not for you filing your mind there. And B—it was your mind that ordered that body to kill those men. An exact double of your mind. Essentially, the same guy, all appearances aside. So if he would kill those men, that means you would kill them, too. After all, it looks like you have quite the criminal record, Mr. Pharaoh.”

“Medina, this is too complicated for us to charge him like that,” Nguyen said. “He needs to be sedated –” a meaningful glance at the nurse “– and recover, and then after that, yeah, we’ll take him in…but we’ll leave it to a judge to decide how accountable this guy really is for what happened.”

“But that was him, not me!” Johnny protested. “I did nothing!”

“Tell it to the judge, then,” said Officer Medina, sneering and resting one hand on the pistol holstered at his belt, “but you aren’t going anywhere, freak.”

Freak? thought Johnny Pharaoh.

“Sir?” said the nurse. “Won’t you please get back in bed?”

Not only was Johnny keenly aware of his surroundings in terms of potential weapons and fighting environment, but he was conscious of the lovely nurse’s position in the room. He mustn’t let her get hit by any stray bullets or rays. Beautiful or not, he had never liked innocent bystanders getting caught in the crossfire. Unprofessional, and just plain not nice.

Do You Know This Girl?

…asked the caption of the image on the large vidscreen facing Toskins when he debarked from the subway tube. A bottom corner of the screen had been covered in spray paint (SEXY! read the streaky graffiti), and every few seconds it crackled with a burst of static. Toskins stopped to stare at it, allowing himself to be bumped and buffeted by the other disgorged passengers, most of whom didn’t give the screen a look despite the fact that it showed a naked murdered woman.

Was it a still photo or a film loop shot by a motionless camera? An idle question that passed through Toskins’ mind. Of more concern to him was that such an image should loom before the faces of children, though a moment later he wondered if his concern was wasted, when one child near him on the platform imitated the facial expression of the dead woman to frighten his sister, and both gurgled with gleefully sadistic laughter as if their throats bubbled blood.

Toskins lived in the nearby city of Miniosis, and tried not to venture into the smaller city of Punktown except when business dictated, as it did this week. Punktown was smaller the way Mars was smaller than Jupiter. It was still big enough. There was certainly too much of Punktown for his tastes. He had once done some business at a Martian colony, and he’d have rather been there today than here. This vidscreen missing person type of posting—the first thing to greet him as he set foot in Punktown—firmly reinforced his attitude. He was instantly flushed full of anxiety and bitterness.

The girl in the image was life size, and revealed to just above her navel. Maybe for the sake of identification they wanted to show the neon-glowing tattoo of a pink teddy bear with one cyclops eye she wore on her upper arm, or perhaps it was thought that a bit of nudity would make people stop and take note.

Her arms were bent a bit stiffly at the elbows, her hands contracted into claws, and a similar effect gripped her tendoned neck and the unsettling grin she wore, her partially blackened lips gone papery and dry and peeled back from a huge leer of gritted teeth. Her eyes fairly bulged, and had a dull grayish sheen as if a membrane lay over them. She was young, maybe mid twenties, and had a short stylish hair cut gone disheveled; with her tattoo and candy-pink nails, such a carefully designed presentation for the world, and yet here she was displayed like this. It was like clipping a poodle only to drown it in a bottle of formaldehyde.

With the back of his overcoat rippling as another tube whooshed past the dock behind him, Toskins took two steps closer to read the type that scrolled from left to right in a dozen languages under the stationary main caption:

“Unknown human female, approximate age twenty-four, discovered 4.25.57 on Platform D of Folger Street Terminal. No purse, wallet, personal identification. Body was found bisected below the hips. Lower portion of body not recovered. If you can identify this woman, or wish to claim her remains, contact Police Precinct 17 at 55.9090.5599.”

Bisected below the hips? Toskins looked sharply up at the woman again, as if for traces of blood spattered on her belly, crusted inside her navel, but saw none. A good thing they had at least not revealed just a few more inches of her (all that remained of her), in the interest of good taste.

Toskins forced himself not to look at her breasts, under the circumstances, ashamed that he wanted to, the more ashamed when he read the enthusiastic graffiti again: “SEXY!” In disgust of this place, as if Punktown itself had murdered the woman, he turned away to find the escalator to the city that awaited him with sadistic glee above.

Murderer. Yes, she must have been murdered, though the posting hadn’t mentioned cause of death. Could it have been a tube accident? Was the bisection the cause of her demise, or something that had come after?

Platform D, eh? This was Platform D.

He must put her out of his mind. As much as it was preferable to dwell on a cadaver than to contemplate his tedious job and the numbing round of meetings he faced, he had best get on with it, and he wanted to keep his mind clear and alert when he hit the streets. After all, this was Punktown.

««—»»

The collar of his overcoat turned up against the sting of winter at his nape, Toskins mounted a pedestrian overpass to cross the roaring metal rapids of Folger Street. The bridge-like overpass was enclosed within a plastic tube to keep out the elements, though it was still frigid inside, and a low-flying helicar seemed almost to scrape its belly across the transparent roof, causing Toskins to duck his head and mutter a curse. Two youths loitering in the clear tunnel snickered at him. Toskins was irritated but didn’t dare make eye contact with them.

If this were Miniosis, he thought bitterly, there would be a security camera, and heat and soft music would be piped into the overpass as well.

His destination, the Hotel Valhalla, was diagonally across the street from the entrance to the Folger Street subway terminal. The company that was hosting his stay had already arranged his accommodations for him, and they would send a driver for him first thing in the morning. He had by necessity got a late start today, having had to finish up a project at his own office, and so there was little more to do this afternoon but settle in and wait for the morrow.

He could see the hotel through the walls of the tunnel, the floor of which vibrated with the vertiginous rush of traffic below his feet. It was a fairly smallish establishment, a bit gray and worn around the edges, but this was after all a pretty rough part of town. He was surprised the place hadn’t uprooted and settled elsewhere. (The offices of his hosts were a few critical blocks over, at the periphery of Industrial Square.) Toward the end of the tunnel he paused to gaze down at the street. A gang of perhaps a dozen Choom boys sauntered along the sidewalk like one many-legged feral beast, hungry for prey. In the opposite direction stalked a filthy and wild-haired asian man with blood streaming down his face from a scalp wound, gesticulating furiously and bellowing something about devils in the subway. Three prosties bundled in faux fur and sporting thigh-high shiny boots sat on a bench outside the hotel’s front entrance, lazily contemplating their prospects.

Toskins stared at the prosties outside the hotel, which must be even seedier than it looked. It gave him a bit of insight into his hosts, made him wary about their frugality. His thoughts fluctuated between the work ahead of him over the next few days, and that very pretty prosty in the middle, who looked to be a nicely stirred blend of white and black, her hair dyed crimson to match her plastic boots. Did he dare to make this trip a little more adventurous than he’d scheduled?

The noisy youths behind him were making him nervous again, so he pressed onward, descending the opposite staircase and exiting the overpass almost directly in front of the Hotel Valhalla.

As he neared it, the center prosty looked up at him with heavy-lidded eyes that were meant to look sensual rather than bored and perhaps high. Overly-full crimson lips drew back slowly to bare bright white teeth that glistened subtly with saliva. What organisms might be swimming in that saliva? Like slithering fanged eels…

Toskins flickered a smile back at the pretty girl, but averted his gaze shyly and found himself hurrying past the bench, and on into the hotel itself.

««—»»

While Toskins waited in line to check in at the counter, he noticed a young woman queuing up to a second clerk, a few paces to his left. She was tall, wore an elegantly cut long winter coat, her honey-colored hair set off by the coat’s black faux fur collar. As if sensing his stealthy gaze, she turned to look in his direction. Instead of sneering or looking quickly away, as he expected in that awkward moment, her pretty pink lips shifted into a subtle but definite smile. Her eyes were green, he judged. She held his gaze for what seemed to him a fantastically long moment, but then his line moved forward by one person and he was obliged to pull up ahead of their previously parallel arrangement.

The couple ahead of Toskins took an inordinately long time at the desk—they had a number of demands, a number of problems, and were very testy—so the blond woman’s line ended up moving at a faster rate, and by the time Toskins had wrapped up his business, he looked to see the woman turning into the entrance of the hotel’s lounge, apparently unaccompanied. Just before she passed through the threshold, she looked back briefly over her shoulder. Was it at the lobby in general, or him in particular?

Don’t be ridiculous, he told himself. A lovely girl like that, a bland little fellow like himself. She had only been polite by smiling before, hadn’t she?

He turned away from alluring mirages to seek out the elevators, and his room on the fourth floor. He shared his lift with two young men in ridiculous T-shirts and fedoras, who seemed to be discussing a science fiction convention here in the hotel, and a middle-aged man who appeared to be at least half-drunk, with one arm snugged around the waist of a stony-faced prosty with a platinum wig that fell in a cape to her knees. She caught Toskins staring at a black sore or lesion on her forehead that her fake spun-gold bangs partially masked.

Unlike the natural blond downstairs, she did not smile when she caught him watching her.

««—»»

The room was small, but it would do. Its tiny bathroom was dominated by a nice big shower stall that he was looking forward to trying out later. It was large enough for two, he thought. For honeymooners and prosties with johns alike.

There was a window looking down on the bridge he had crossed only a half hour earlier. Already the sky was growing dusky with evening, and the city was glowing bejeweled through the deepening violet mist, a deceptively pretty sight, the way a bioluminescent bauble dazzles at the mouth of a deep sea fish.

Toskins had tossed his suitcase across his bed and asked for the robot bellhop to bring him up some coffee and a ham sandwich for dinner. It had lingered in confusion, fighting to digest his request, its programming glitched. He had sighed and shut the door in what passed for its face. Maybe he’d go down to the hotel’s restaurant later. They might even have some food in the lounge.

Why not go there right now? part of him urged eagerly.

A more realistic part of him ignored the adolescent voice. He moved to the vidtank, switched it on for company as he unpacked.

Outside the window, he heard a few distant crackles of gunfire, and foolishly felt like ducking around the edge of the frame, out of sight of some sniper. Instead he gazed down at the street again. Traffic had thinned by about half already, now that it was the tail end of rush hour. Peripherally, he listened to a succession of news stories from the VT, each seemingly more horrific than the last. Punktown’s daily summary of atrocities.

…A top executive of a biotechnology lab had shotgunned his own head apart in the company meeting room, being sure to call all his chief underlings in first to witness the deed. No cause was given for his actions, but before he pulled the trigger the executive sobbed for his people to please forgive him for some unspecified sins…

…City officials were concerned about the growing number of mutations, both sentient and animal, many of them potentially dangerous, seen aboveground following Punktown’s recent catastrophic earthquake, flushed out from the caved-in sewers and subway tunnels they had formerly hidden away in…

…A Kalian religious fanatic had entered the Chrislamic Cathedral here in town during a mass and stabbed four people, one of whom had died of his wounds, all the while screaming about the impending apocalyptic arrival of the Kalian demon-god Ugghiutu…

…A number of unclassified life forms had beam skipped—stowed away in teleported cargo—from a remote research colony to this long-established colony of Punktown on the planet Oasis. It was not yet known whether they were animals or sentient beings, but they had killed one man already at the research base…

…The body of a murdered woman had been discovered in the ladies room of the bus station off Industrial Square. The woman, a thirty-one year old waitress, had been severed at the waist—Toskins spun around to look at the screen sharply—though her lower portion had not been recovered. He caught only a glimpse of a smiling photo of the woman in life, followed by footage of red-uniformed men carrying a bagged, truncated form through the bus terminal’s front doors…

Had to be a serial killer, he thought.

Having had enough, Toskins growled at the VT to put on a wallpaper design, and a background of jazz at low volume. It complied. Swirling greens and blues from the VT screen softly glowed across his hotel room’s walls soothingly, and the music was like something he’d be playing at home right now. That was much better. He finished his packing, set up his palmcomp atop a little desk, logged on to read his mail. This ended up taking a bit over two hours, as there was some business to address amidst all the junk mail to dispose of. Finally he got up to stretch, decided he had best go downstairs and get something to eat after all—though in the restaurant, not the lounge. Not that he expected the attractive blond to still be there. If she’d been looking for dinner, she’d had it. If she’d been looking for companionship, she’d have found that, too.

Should he have followed her into the lounge after all? Why wasn’t it possible she had been looking over her shoulder at him? Why must he always sell himself short, limit his own possibilities? If it weren’t for his insecurities, might he not be higher in his company by now? Perhaps tonight yet another of many squandered opportunities had trickled between his frail fingers. And thus, here he was alone in a bad hotel on a diplomatic visit to a cheap business associate.

He wandered to his window while he slipped back into his suit jacket, for one more look at the city in its full night glory before he tinted the window a nice opaque black.

He half hoped to see more long-legged prosties on parade; they were more abundant and less discreet than in Miniosis. But by the same token, he always felt guilty when looking at them, the way images he’d seen on VT of cows being slaughtered and processed for meat made him guilty for not being a vegetarian. Well, was it his fault that his girlfriend had broken off with him fourteen months ago? (Actually, according to her it was.) Was it his fault he was not only leery of entering a new relationship, but finding it difficult to even meet a woman to be leery of?

He saw no prosties, in any case, as his gaze slowly swept the street below. Traffic had thinned to a dribble, a drying up riverbed, at least in comparison to when he’d arrived. He saw only a few skulking pedestrians, and was about to turn away when his eyes returned to the illuminated mouth of the subway kiosk, the steps he had ascended himself hours before.

Something dark, some fast silhouette, had come dancing nimbly up those stairs and darted off into the shadows of the street, all in a blink and a half. He had seen many an alien life form in Punktown and in Miniosis, but it hadn’t looked like any he’d encountered before. Not that a person might ever encounter all of them. The thing had appeared very pointed, very elongated, and apparently without arms. Along with his impression, in the nanosecond in which it was lit by the sickly lights of the kiosk, that its skin was a dark reddish color, it had suggested to him a giant carrot scuttling along on three or four crooked legs.

Maybe he’d seen something else, misinterpreted it; it had only been a flash, after all. And yet, for some reason the sight of the thing had disturbed him greatly, caused a shivering wave to flow up the back of his arms, neck and skull, as if the thing had transmitted a current of electricity that he had received in his very nervous system. In fact, he still sensed a whispery current crawling inside him, as if the thing lurked in some alley, surreptitiously gazing up at his window at his face pressed to the glass, the way he himself had been spying for prosties.

He tinted the glass fully black. Stepped backwards and shuddered. Then left his room to see about that food.

««—»»

Dinner was adequate: nodyee, a blind but predatory, shark-like Tikkihotto fish which projected sonar waves from an aperture in its phallic, armor-plated head. He’d always been curious about it, but found it a bit too fishy and salty for his taste. He sat eating alone, watching others at their tables around him while he chewed self-consciously. Trying not to look for the blond but doing so anyway. Along with the fish he had a salad and a couple of beers to help him sleep in a strange place.

At the next table, a man in a jacket that could not aspire to close over his immense gut worked on a slab of steak so pink it looked uncooked. His open jacket revealed a gun holstered against this taut globe. He saw Toskins looking at it, and quickly reassured him by twisting around in his seat so that Toskins might see a badge ID pinned to his jacket, which he tapped with his knife. It read: SECURITY. The fat man winked and masticated. Toskins smiled, embarrassed to have been caught staring, and resumed his own meal. He was also embarrassed by what he took to be a bit of lasciviousness in the man’s wink, and in the passing of his tongue over his greased upper lip.

By the time Toskins wandered out of the Hotel Valhalla’s restaurant, he was ready to try out that shower, climb into bed and watch a little VT before dozing off. It would be an early day tomorrow.

He was walking down a dimly-lit side hallway that throbbed deeply with loud dance music from the lounge on the other side of the wall—his destination a row of elevators—when he saw a dark, furtive figure step out from behind a trough of exotic plants.

Despite the subdued lighting he instantly recognized the honey blond, in her long winter coat. Though his entire nervous system surged with a delirious little thrill to see her again, her sudden lurching appearance startled him, and he faltered to a halt.

The woman was grinning at him. Nothing subtle about her smile this time. A huge grin, wild even, her eyes glittering large and glassy. Drunk, he thought. And that would explain her jerky movements as well, when she waved her arm at him twice, awkwardly, in an unmistakable gesture for him to come to her.

Too nervous to smile back but too excited to resist her bold invitation, Toskins started forward again.

But he had taken only a few steps further along the hallway when he saw the woman turn abruptly to the nearest elevator, bat the keypad clumsily twice until the door slid open, then stumble inside.

Toskins quickened his pace, glancing over his shoulder at a giggling couple coming up behind him. He wanted to get in the lift with the blond before the other two piled in with them.

But before he reached the threshold, its door slid closed again, and the indicators above started lighting in sequence. Floor two…

Was it a game, then? A tease?

Anger filled him. He stood there seething, watching the numbers, while the couple took the elevator to his right and left him alone once more. Third floor. Fourth, where he had his room…

But what if it wasn’t a tease? What if she only meant to be discreet? That they should arrive at their destination independently?

Her elevator stopped at the sixth, and top, floor.

There was only one way to find out if she were merely taunting him or not. He would not let his insecurities hold him back yet again. Toskins stabbed a finger into the keypad. When the same elevator descended, he slipped into it and tapped the key for the sixth floor.

««—»»

Standing outside the bank of elevators on the sixth floor, Toskins looked up the hallway and down again. He heard a door snick shut, and a giggle just before it did…but when he walked to it and listened, he thought he heard a man’s deep voice in conversation. Couldn’t have been his girl.

He walked to one end of the hall, turned a corner, and felt an odd electric sensation. It was almost like a perfume she had left lingering in the air. Something that told him, on a primal level, that this was the right way.

And when he’d walked only a few steps, he saw a door open a bit further ahead. The blond woman half peeked out, and waved her arm in an exaggerated drunken manner once again, before she slipped back out of view. But she left the door open for him, and he quickened his pace.

Toskins entered. The door slid shut behind him automatically a moment later.

The lights were low in her room. She stood across from him, still grinning wildly, so unlike the composed beauty he’d seen early that evening. At that time, he hadn’t realized what animal desires writhed below her skin. Her honey blond hair was disheveled, and her eyes were wide and glassy—so manic that they appeared not even to be seeing him. But as out of control as she seemed, how could he resist her? She was so beautiful…

“Hi,” he stammered, watching her weave unsteadily. “I’m…”

He cut himself off, as his eyes dropped to the hem of her long coat, and below it. In the distance and gloom of the lower hallway, he’d subconsciously noted the slimness of her calves, noticed in a peripheral way that they seemed very, very thin…dark…perhaps dark nylons, dark clingy boots…but now…now…

In an abrupt motion she flopped her arms out from her like wings, and her heavy overcoat fell open, half slid off her shoulders before catching at her elbows. As it parted, he could see that she was naked beneath.

He digested this for a moment. Then he screamed. Then the woman rushed at him.

He clawed at the door’s keypad, but had to duck to one side in time to avoid the woman when she collided heavily against the door. He heard a cracking sound, and when he whirled to face her again, and she spun to grin at him, he saw blood flowing into the hollow above her lip. She had broken her nose against the door. Her teeth were smeared red. Her coat had slid further off, now just hanging from one arm. She flicked that arm madly, as if it were a fish fighting against a hooked line. The coat dropped fully off her at last, like a shed skin.

Her breasts were delicate, almost adolescent, their aureoles a pale pink as if daintily painted onto china. Her skin was flawless, like alabaster; she was Galatea, sculpted by Pygmalion, brought to life by Aphrodite.

Except that she wasn’t alive, and she was only flawless to the waist, because that was where the alabaster statue had been broken in half.

Below the ragged hem of her waist, she was a monster.

Toskins knew then on some deep, numbly analytical level, that her pallid perfection had much to do with the fact that she was mostly empty of blood. The broken rim was caked and crusted, but no new gore dripped from her underside. Yet it wasn’t just blood that had been removed…she had to have been at least partially hollowed out, sometime since he had seen her alive and intact earlier that night. Because there was another being that was occupying her insides, now.

It had bored up inside her like a hand in a puppet.

Toskins backed away. The creature scuttled forward. It had four skinny legs, a dark red like that part of its body which showed beneath the contrasting flesh of the dead woman.

Just below the point where the woman’s body ended, a half dozen vertical orifices ringed the creature’s body. They worked independently of each other, and were full of combs of teeth. Mouths…

The blond’s arms spasmed, leapt, jolted erratically as she advanced on him. Somehow, the being or animal was electrifying her, the way a dead frog can be stimulated into movement. And still she smiled, her crazed eyes unseeing.

He kept backing off, crouched for action, feinting from side to side like a boxer, to keep the thing from knowing which direction he might dart in. They danced warily. Toskins heard himself whimpering and pleading and muttering to himself under his breath…

He bellowed suddenly and explosively for help—at the same time that the centaur-like creature reared onto its two back legs, bringing the two front legs up into the air in front of it. These were its true arms, not those of the girl. At first Toskins had thought the crooked, bony limbs ended in crab pincers…until he saw the forelimbs lift, reaching toward him, and realized that these appendages ended in two human-like thumbs opposable to each other.

He spun away and the thing bore down on him. He evaded its lunge by leaping up onto the room’s bed, where the woman’s suitcase lay unopened, springing off the other side…then dashing the short distance into the bathroom.

Toskins half turned to fumble with the keypad to close and lock the door. As it began to slide shut, the creature thrust its flesh disguise into the space. The door jammed against the dead woman. She leered at Toskins, her electrified pretty face close enough to kiss. He saw how her eyes were going a glazed grayish color. A droplet of blood fell from a nostril to the carpet.

The door sensed that it had struck an obstacle and started to open again, a safety feature, but Toskins overrode the feature by hitting the CLOSE key again and again, rapidly, desperately, so that the door would open no further. Confused, it whirred and wavered but he kept it from admitting his assailant.

He thought to push the cadaver back out. But before he could do so, the creature withdrew instead. It freed itself from being pinned by slipping out of the woman’s body. Still wedged between the door and jamb, but released by its puppeteer, the bisected corpse began to slide down toward the floor. Toskins abandoned the keypad to grab her under the armpits, pulled her toward him in one violent jerk, and dropped her truncated form at his feet…intending to close the door fully and lock it this time.

But it was sliding open automatically again, and he had been diverted; before he could reach the keypad, the creature was through the door, its forelimbs seizing hold of his shirt front. Toskins screamed once more, frantic, panicking, driven backward against the closed transparent door to the oversized shower stall.

One of the vertical mouths that ringed the creature clenched the front of his shirt, so as to hold onto him. In doing so, the teeth scraped his flesh, drawing blood.

Divested of its human camouflage, the creature or entity, whatever it might be, loomed almost to his own height, its rugose body tapering to a point. It had no limbs, eyes, no features at all above that ring of mouths. Except that at the very top, on level with his face, there was a crown of swarming, wriggling translucent tendrils. Toskins knew that it had been these, inserted into the brain of the cadaver, or cradling it like a hand, that had sparked her convulsive motions.

He seized the wrists of the forelimbs, with a surge of adrenaline fought to press the thing back away from him. He heard a snapping, gnashing sound down near his belly, knew that the mouths were trying to catch hold of more than just his shirt.

As the creature leaned its weight forward, in a surge of its own, that nest of writhing tentacles swept under Toskins’ nose, brushed against his face.

Toskins had teeth, too.

He opened them wide, clamped down hard on what seemed like a mouthful of rubbery snakes and jerked his head violently like a dog worrying a cat in its jaws.

The only sound he had yet heard from the creature came then—and he wasn’t sure where it originated from, but it was like a high pig squeal mixed with a sound like the death rattle of a child with its throat cut. And then the creature released him, skittering back away from him several steps. It released his shirt, and he let go of its wrists and tendrils.

Before the thing could gather itself for a fresh attack—stunned by its pain and now made wary of its opponent—Toskins shoved the shower door open, jumped into the tub, and slid the door closed again just in time, as the creature thudded against it.

He braced all his weight against the door, his hands splayed across the transparent plastic like suction cups. He ignored the dead man who lay in the tub at his feet. Tried not to see the corpse’s horribly broken state, the arm that lay disconnected, the splashed and draining blood.

So…he wasn’t the first prey that had been lured tonight.

The creature reared onto its hind legs once more, its front limbs scrabbling at the clear panel. It couldn’t get good purchase. Through the door, Toskins could see that its prehensile thumbs had thick blunt nails on them. Their human aspect sickened him.

He took in those mouths more closely now, and realized he was sobbing as he did so.

Crimson lips peeled inside out to expose black gums set with teeth overlapping and crowding each other in their lust to rend. They ground and grated against each other, but not in synchronized movements. Toskins realized that he could see into the mouths in front and out of the mouths in back. He could see the wall straight through its body. All the mouths fed into the same gullet, which must lie just below the belt of fanged orifices. The base of the creature bulged under that ring of mouths, where its guts processed the chunks of meat that would be torn free to tumble into its yawning well.

The mouths that faced toward its intended prey began to take turns popping their gums forward out of their sockets of flesh, the vertical openings stretching wider, the way a great white shark can extend its jaws to seize onto flesh.

There were shreds of flesh, in fact, and clots of blood, staining those combs of teeth.

Throughout his nervous system he could feel a nearly telepathic transmission of a hunger so extreme it was a yearning…a desire…an almost sexual thing.

Toskins resumed his bellowing for help. If at least that half-malfunctioning robot bellhop would come to distract the creature. Was it sentient? Was it an alien? A mutant? That numb analytical portion of his brain contemplated it while his emotions raced and caromed deliriously. It glistened an agonized scarlet, like a thing flayed down to the grooved and convoluted muscle…tapered raw red like a plucked nerve that needed to clothe itself in flesh to dull its naked sensations. Had terror not made him incapable of deeper musings, he might have wondered if the thing didn’t so much masquerade in the flesh of humans to lure prey as to complete its tortured body.

He felt wetness winding its way down into his underwear, chanced a glance at his belly, saw the stain growing there across his tattered shirt front. So it had more than nicked his flesh. He groaned hopelessly and shut his eyes. He struggled to ignore the pressure of the sundered corpse against his ankles, but he couldn’t help but have noticed that it was eaten nearly in two through the middle; its face was intact but its guts appeared to have been entirely consumed. This might be the preferred part of the creature’s prey, in addition to its mouths being on level with the human mid-section.

His eyes flashed open when he heard the clicking of the thing’s nails, as it switched from scratching at the panel itself and instead tried to work its fingers around the edge of the door, so as to slide it in its track.

His palms squeaked as he had to lean his weight more heavily against the door to prevent it from sliding.

Toskins roared so loudly for help that his lungs felt full of scorching smoke.

He looked wildly around him for a weapon, even down at the horrible corpse. It was foolish, but might the dead man have had a gun on him? This was, after all, Punktown. Maybe he did, but hadn’t got to it in time.

There was no gun. But Toskins saw that the man’s right arm had been chewed off just above the elbow. The severed limb was badly mauled but intact; he guessed that the man had had it wrenched from him while fighting for his life, but the thing had spat it out so as to concentrate on the viscera.

Keeping one palm against the door, Toskins took a chance and knelt down quickly, seizing the severed limb near its base. Cold flesh, coagulating blood, but he fought his revulsion as he stood with the limb in hand…and released his pressure from the door for just an instant.

It slid open nearly a foot before he pressed his full weight against it again. Through the narrow opening, he thrust the severed limb.

The limb was seized instantly. Toskins held it as long as he could, but that was only seconds; the creature tugged the limb from his hand, scuttling back from the door as it did so.

It was his only chance at escape, slim as it might be.

He whisked the door fully aside, began to scramble out of the tub, meaning to push the thing with both hands as he rushed past it. Maybe he would topple it, maybe it would only be diverted a second or two, but hopefully it would be enough to get him past the thing, back into the hotel room. If he could just reach the door to the hallway before it did…

As he had hoped, the creature seemed confused by the prize it had won, stood standing there on its four skinny legs with the severed arm dangling out of one of its mouths while a second mouth strained out of its socket in an attempt to grasp the stump, as if a civil war might ensue over the morsel.

But as Toskins started to exit the tub, he slipped in the blood of the dead man and crashed to the tiles at the feet of the creature.

He stared up at it, screamed, saw one limb leave the ground as if it meant to step on him, to pin him down…or perhaps to clutch him by the shirt and drag him up toward those scissoring teeth.

However, falling to the floor might have saved Toskins’ life. There were nearly a dozen loud, sharp cracks that he thought at first were bones snapping in the severed arm—until he saw exit wounds pop open across the blind thing’s tapered body. Blood that was a thicker and darker red than human blood, as if even its corpuscles were perversely engorged, spattered and drooled out of chunky raw wounds. The entity staggered forward a few steps, nearly stomping across Toskins as it did so. Small craters pocked the glossy interior of the shower stall where Toskins had been standing only a moment earlier.

The monster tried to dash out of the room (Toskins realized then that it could just as easily move in any direction since it had no real front, back or sides), but at last its wounds were too much for it, and it fell through the threshold, lay heavily upon its side. The mouths gnashed a few times more…but slower…slower…then froze in their grins.

A vast bulk became silhouetted in the bathroom’s doorway. Wheezing, the security guard Toskins had met in the restaurant pushed past the dead thing to reach him. He holstered his gun and gave Toskins a hand to hoist him to his feet. This close to the security officer, Toskins could smell the beef and alcohol on the great tide of his breath.

“Neighbors heard you screaming,” the fat man explained.

Toskins fell against the man’s barrel chest, began to heave with squeaking little sobs. The security man cooed sympathetically and slid his weighty arms around him, rubbed his back up and down soothingly.

“It’s all right,” the man rumbled like a father reassuring his child after a bad dream. It was just reassuring enough for Toskins to ignore the man’s growing erection.

««—»»

He was given a new room in the hotel for the night. But even if the detectives from Precinct 17 hadn’t questioned him for almost two hours, he wouldn’t have got much sleep. In the morning, he called the people who were supposed to come meet him at the hotel, and told them not to. He explained to them what had happened, and then called his own company.

He told them that he needed to get out of Punktown as soon as possible.

Toskins could tell his superior was disappointed at the meeting’s postponement, but what could the man say?

And he was sympathetic enough to send someone all the way to Punktown in a car to fetch Toskins home to his own city of Miniosis.

Toskins had told his boss that he couldn’t bring himself to go into the subway again.

Later, he would learn that the honey blond had, herself, been a prosty. He was surprised, and felt an odd kind of disillusionment at the news. The suitcase in her room contained lingerie, perfumed oils, sex toys, handcuffs. The dead man in the shower, a wealthy businessman, was assumed to be the client who was to have met her at the room.

And while she had some ID in her room, it was found to be false. The real identity of the blond was never discovered.

Monsters

There was a man, human, with a gash to the bone across his right cheek, his ear messily bisected as well. His collar was stiff with drying gore but the bleeding had been stopped with a spray, probably at the factory where he had received the injury, though the fissure still needed to be mended and the man was at the triage counter demanding painkillers. Another Earth colonist, his hand wrapped in gauze wet with fresher blood, was also becoming agitated with another triage worker. “I have M-670, you know,” he said threateningly. “You want me to open this?” He plucked at the end of the spooled gauze. “You want me to fling a little of this on you? Yeah?”

Fleck watched a security man wade through the milling people—all of them seeming stunned, even those who weren’t damaged or ill—heading toward the counter with his hand poised over his shock wand, but the shriek of an infant called away Fleck’s attention. He craned his neck, yet couldn’t see where the cry had come from in the thick of the waiting room, where on a large VT screen near the ceiling a commercial aimed at the KeeZee race showed pigs’ disembodied heads with wings sprouting from their temples flying around in a circle singing in a chorus of children’s voices, “Meat-meat, meat-meat…” while a KeeZee boy with a head like a monkey-wrench dipped in skin gaped up at the vision, masticating air in anticipation.

Then, there was another sound that made Fleck forget the cry of the child and the chorus of pigs’ heads. This sound was like both of those in combination: a chorus of piercing screams. There seemed to be three or four voices overlapping, each like the screech of a hawk, but sustained and ululating.

“Here she comes,” said Dr. Midas, standing beside him. They had been expecting this one, having been called down specifically—Midas to head the emergency procedures while Fleck observed, because he had no familiarity with this race. Later, Fleck would perform the reconstructive work himself. He was highly regarded in his field. Midas joked that it was Fleck with his golden touch who should own the older surgeon’s name.

“Oh,” was all Fleck could say, dazed by the sight of the thing as the paramedics half led, half dragged (and was someone even pushing it, hidden behind its bulk?) the being into the ER. They barely squeezed its mass through the double doors. The sound from it increased terribly and Fleck had never seen the cries of one victim draw the attention of all the other patients who waited—often for hours—to be ministered to, distracting them from their own anxieties.

“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Midas said, smiling.

Fleck looked over at him to see if he were being sarcastic, then looked back at the wounded entity, which despite all the alien races and mutations he had seen in this city since his arrival, eight months earlier, had to be the most hideous sentient life form he had ever set eyes upon.

The monster was somewhat caterpillar-like, an indeterminate number of legs obscured by the bloated segments that pulsed with its labored progress. The brown flesh was dark up front, where the forelimbs and what passed for a head were located, though the long body became more translucent further back, showing layers of fibrous lace beneath the glossy outer skin. Dangling strands and bundled clots of this net-like lace hung out of the gaping wounds inflicted on the creature. A silken embroidered cloth, strapped like a saddle to its back in one place, apparently covered a row of bulbous protuberances. Symbols had been branded into two segments of the grub body, and at the very end of it, a series of apertures were encircled by tattoos.

Midas explained to his colleague, “The tapestry covers some nodules they grow by symbolically implanting a seed they know will inflame the surrounding tissue. Like a pearl growing around a grain of sand. But they have to hide these orbs from the eyes of anyone but their mates. The brands—that one right there is the parents’ family crest, and that one belongs to her impatient fiancé. And the tattoos—heh—they’re a potent curse to anyone who might think about poking around the back door.”

As the paramedics and now some of the ER staff fought to get the creature around the corner of the triage counter and into an off-shooting corridor, the assembly of querulous patients moving very willingly out of its way, Midas pointed toward the vast body and said, “We could theoretically cut her off from that point on—it’s all useless tissue, nothing vital in there that can’t be rerouted—they gorge them for some aesthetic reason, maybe to make them too cumbersome to run away from the males—heh—but then she’d be more disfigured than she already is.”

Fleck saw that the man with the stained, gauze-bound hand stared in horror at the snail trail of blood the entity was leaving across the polished floor. Already, two blankly-determined robots were whisking into the reception area to clean up and disinfect. The blood was pouring down the thing’s flanks from great crusted scabs that the paramedics had no doubt spray-sealed, to little effect. The most serious injuries seemed to be to the head, though without knowing what the head should look like, Fleck couldn’t be sure. It had no face—just a crater, drooling threads of ichor. As alien as the alien was, its life fluid was a disturbingly human red in color.

He had no idea from which places along the body came the hawk-like chorus (oddly, it didn’t seem to emanate from the face crater), though these cries were becoming ragged and tapering away, to be replaced with a wheeze that was just as horrible, if less painful to the ears.

The being was almost into the corridor, and Midas touched Fleck’s elbow to indicate it was time to follow. As they started forward, a stabbing scream caused Fleck to look back toward the front of the sizable waiting area. That unseen infant again, shrieking like an inconsolable ghost child. How could it be that he, a veteran healer—and particularly in a place as full of crying children as the city called Punktown—had not become immune to such a sound?

As he was looking back, Fleck saw that the swimming pigs’ heads had floated off the VT’s screen and were circling the waiting area near the ceiling, even though the commercial had ended and a game show had come back on. They no longer sang, but smiled anthropomorphically. One of the heads drifted down toward a jittery man too nervous to be seated; Fleck guessed that he was overdosed on buttons or even purple vortex. The man’s eyes went wide and he scrambled backwards, bumping into people, turned to flee from the grinning head as it continued to follow him, swooping down very close. A gang kid clutching a scorched ray wound to his shoulder pushed at the addict angrily for bumping into him, and the man fell to the floor, yelping and babbling, “Meat! Meat! Meat!” as the disembodied head bobbed only inches from him. A nurse elbowed through the throng, and used a spray can to mist the man’s body. The spell was broken and the head rose like a released balloon. Another staff member pointed the VT’s remote and touched an ad-banishing button. All of the porcine holographic heads vanished.

“Fleck?” said Midas, waiting in the corridor’s threshold. He nodded at the river of blood. “Watch your step.”

««—»»

“The Kalians and the Stems do stuff like this to their females, too,” said Dr. Midas, as he worked over the great drugged form that nearly filled Operating Room 17. It lay on a tarp on the floor. Steam rose from one of the wounds he had cleared the thick scabs from. “Deep,” he muttered, “deep.” He resumed what he’d been saying. “A Kalian woman might have acid thrown in her face…if she isn’t stoned to death first.”

“What did she do, doctor?” one of the nurses spoke up.

“Premarital sex, Wanda,” he said. Then he wagged a bloody probe at the nurse. “Let that be a lesson to you.”

“How did they make these wounds on her?” Fleck asked, staring into the well-like injury Midas hovered over. “Some sort of weapon?”

“With their mouths, my boy. Their mouths—like lampreys, with retractable teeth.”

“But who did it to her?” Wanda asked. “Clerics?”

“Her family, Wanda. It was their responsibility to punish her, so as to save face.”

“My God. But how did they feel about having to do that?”

“They must not have felt too badly,” Fleck murmured grimly. “They did it, didn’t they?”

“Were they trying to kill her, ultimately?” Wanda persisted.

“Nope,” Midas said. “Mutilate her, but leave her alive as a warning to all.”

“And her fiancé, who seduced her?” asked Fleck.

“Banished from the community. Disgraced, but intact. He’ll teleport back home, and have to find another community to take him in.”

A deep, rumbling gurgle resonated through the slumbering thing’s body. The vibration actually went through Fleck’s soles, startling him. Disturbingly, it had almost sounded to him like a string of bass tone words. “Is she sufficiently under anaesthesia?”

“Don’t worry—just talking in her sleep,” Midas replied. A sizzling sound as he worked, both his hands sunk to their wrists in the wound. “Well, trying to talk. The females’ vocal cords are severed as children.”

“It’s appalling,” Fleck said as if to himself, looking over toward the head area, currently hidden under a cloth. “Unthinkable.”

Midas raised his head, helmeted like the others’. “Still not used to this, are you?”

Fleck felt somewhat embarrassed, kept his eyes from his friend’s as he grumbled, “I don’t ever want to be used to this.”

“Well, I didn’t say you should ever become unconcerned, my boy. But you have to get used to it, if you’re going to stay in Punktown.”

At twenty-eight, Fleck had up until now lived in a smallish Earth colony on a moon of the Tikkihottos’ home world. He had been to their planet for a year as an intern, and while there had seen some ugly sights in emergency wards, but nothing on the scale of Punktown, here on planet Oasis. He had thought the Tikkihottos’ world had been hellish, compared to the sedate colony he called home…but Punktown made that seem like a utopia.

Up until Punktown, his skills as a reconstructive surgeon had been mostly honed by repairing hovercar and industrial injuries, congenital deformities, mutations. By reconfiguring the countenances and bodies of the vain. He had secretly, self-consciously thought of himself as an artist…and he did, in fact, like to paint, though he had seldom showed friends or family his work and displayed none of it openly, even in his own apartment. But here, in Punktown, there was little time for delicacy or finesse. He had had to step up his preferred pace, so as to move one patient out and bring in the next. Assembly line work.

“I hate this,” he said. “All of this. The gang killings. The serial killings. The killings without even a reason of insanity to explain them…”

“Your talents are best served here, Fleck,” Midas said. “This is where you’re needed—exactly because it is so ugly.”

“How can you stand it, sometimes? Sometimes it must…it has to…horrify you.”

“Well, I worked for a time as an intern in a burn unit for children. We called them—away from the parents, of course—toasty tots.”

“What?”

“We had to, my boy.” Midas lowered his gaze to his patient. “We had to make jokes. We had to go in there every day, have a coffee, and get to work. We had to get past the burnt flesh of children.”

“But you can’t get past it. You can’t. It’s the very thing you’re working on.”

“Well, I guess you can’t get past the burnt flesh,” Midas amended. “It was that they were children, we had to get past.”

««—»»

The next time they shared an operating room, it was Midas who observed while Fleck worked—rather self-consciously, as if he were at his easel. But Midas assured him, “You’re doing great, on her. Just great. I knew you’d be fine with it.”

The saddle-like tapestry was unbuckled, set aside. While he infused one of the patched-up but still shocking wounds with a solution to engender localized cloning, Fleck raised his eyes to the half-dozen shiny brown nodes along the back and said, “Too sexy, huh?”

“Ohhh, yeah. Please cover them up again, before I dampen my undies.”

“I’d like to see their mouths, that can inflict injuries like these,” Fleck groused, waving a gloved hand over the circular pit.

“No you wouldn’t. Ugly buggers. Small, though, not like our lady. Their mouths are like hers, except she doesn’t have the retractable teeth.”

“Born that way? Or pulled out?”

Midas smiled inside his helmet. “Which do you think?”

“Can’t bite back,” Fleck mumbled.

««—»»

“I’m sorry,” he said, withdrawing his hand sharply. “Please forgive me if I’m touching you in a way you find inappropriate.”

She occupied a room, Room 40, alone—both beds removed, gym mats placed on the floor for her. It was two days since he had labored over the somnolent monster, and Fleck was checking the progress of his work. Upon awakening the previous day, the alien had begun emitting her multiple hawk cries again until attendants realized it was because her tapestry saddle was removed; several female nurses had then rushed in to replace it. Presently, in running his hands over her glazed, translucent hide, Fleck had found himself stroking one of the wound sites—now only a slightly concave depression—as if to test its soundness. As he had done so, a low but weighty rumble had traveled through the turgid mass that was her body.

Still, she had not begun to shriek again, and she had not thrashed or even flinched. Could she have found his touch…soothing? Gingerly, lightly, he laid his bare hands upon her again, feeling at other areas he had mended with his magic.

“I wish there were an easy way we could communicate. I know you can understand me, at least.” A translating chip on an adhesive disk was stuck to the back of the being’s head. “Do you know how to write any English?” Fleck asked, suddenly hopeful, but his patient made no rumbles in response.

His hands slid gently forward, to her head, and he felt at the skull that had been fractured with blows but fused whole again. The huge orifice was not an excised face, as he had feared in the ER; it was all she had for a visage. The inside of the deep crater was filled with cobweb-like strands that were ever blowing outward on a weak exhaust, a bit chilly and unsettling but at least without scent. He wanted to roll back the one tire-like thick lip, to see the gums from which her rows of lamprey fangs had been pulled, but he had not had to repair in there and felt awkward about examining her in that way.

“I’m told there’s a safe place in the Outback Colony where you’ll be taken in another few days. I’m glad to hear that. I don’t want you to be attacked again.” Still, no thundering noises to acknowledge his words. Uncomfortably, he prattled on, “It’s very tragic…what happened to you. I don’t understand it. How a person can injure anyone in that way, let alone a family member.” He thought better of expressing his personal opinions so candidly, and bit off his words as he concluded his visual inspection of his artistry. All he would say when he finished was, “There—beautiful again, eh?” Without thinking, he patted her flank as though she were a horse. He hoped she understood the smiling expression on his own face.

He was heading for the door, and off to check on the progress of a less exotic patient, when he heard a rolling boom at last behind him. He paused in the doorway to look back. The dormant volcano of a face gaped at him inscrutably, and the tiny brown forelimbs hung idle like the useless arms of a Tyrannosaurus. He waited a few beats, but nothing more.

“Have a good evening,” he told her. “Ring the nurse—that button there, you know—if you need anything.”

He had taken only a few steps down the corridor when his hand phone beeped, and he plucked it from his pocket. A woman on screen said, “Dr. Fleck, you have a call on line 12. Would you like it here or in your office?”

“Emergency?”

“No…well, it’s about your patient in Room 40.”

A newspaper? VT crew? There had been a little bit of media interest in the story; he had even rather proudly bought a copy of a paper that mentioned him and Midas, their work to restore the disfigured being after her harsh punishment.

“I’ll take it in my office, thanks. Be right there.”

««—»»

When Fleck was seated at his desk and switched his comp on, a bright red logo for Fl’eye Communications instantly leapt off the screen and began to orbit his wrist like a bracelet. He muttered a curse under his breath, his right hand fumbling through a drawer of his desk for a can to spray himself with so as to repel the pesky thing. With his left, he tapped a key to bring up his call. But when he saw the face—or lack of a face—on his screen, he forgot about the parasitic logo.

“Dr. Fleck?” the creature on the screen said, its voice translated into English. The huge O of its mouth, of its entire countenance, did not move. Cobwebs stirred outwards from the thing’s continuous exhalation. Fleck found himself staring into the maw for the dim glimmer of teeth in overlapping rows, but didn’t see any. He almost wanted to hit a magnifying feature, to look more closely.

“Yes,” he replied numbly. He thought of what Nietzsche had said, about the abyss staring also into you.

“It has come to our attention that you are administering reconstructive processes to a female of our kind. A female of my family.”

“Your family…” Fleck echoed.

“We discourage you, in the strongest possible terms, from conducting these procedures.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Fleck said tightly, realizing that he had begun to tremble, “but the procedures are all but finished, and my patient has made a fine recovery considering the severity of the damage that she suffered.”

“Then…we are too late.”

“Yes. She is healed. Sorry, but that’s what we do here.”

“You must undo it, then.”

“What? We don’t undo the work we perform to save people’s lives and make them healthy again. Are you insane? You people…you people should be arrested for what you did.” The forcers were in fact looking for the particular family members who had tortured the female, though the punishment meted out to them might not be too great if they argued passionately enough that it was an important cultural or religious practice. Fleck thought he should trace this call, and surreptitiously fingered a few more keys. In a corner of the screen, the information came up. The being was wisely calling from a payphone at the Canberra Mall.

It stood there immobile, as if embalmed. Just the webs blowing. Judging from the thin neck and boney shoulders, it was somewhat humanoid in form, and almost skeletal, but the voice as translated was bold and strong. “You had no right to interfere in our judgment. You have undone an important ritual that we were bound by our traditions to perform. What you have done is akin to spitting on the steps of one of our temples.”

“I’d rather spit on a temple’s steps than bite huge holes out of a living person’s body!”

“Your arrogance is unforgivable.”

“My arrogance? Mine? Look…who are you? Her brother, her cousin, what?”

“I am her father.”

“Her father? Her father…” He was wagging his head in dumbfounded disgust.

“Justice must be restored.”

“You stay away from her, you hear? Anyway…anyway…she’s already on her way to a place where you won’t find her. Ever. We sent her away yesterday,” he lied.

“Justice must be restored.”

“Bite me,” Fleck snapped, and hit a key, expelling the abyss-faced entity from his screen. Then he realized what he had said. Not so funny, taken in another light.

The eager icon circled round and round his wrist. With a surge of hatred, Fleck plunged his right hand back into the open drawer, located the can, and sprayed his arm as if it were insecticide with which to kill the glowing red parasite. The thing lost his scent, became oblivious to him, drifted up toward the ceiling where it might bob idly like a moth against a lampshade until it finally faded away, an hour or two later.

He placed a call to the hospital’s security office, and talked to the sergeant on duty, a heavy-jawed KeeZee with three impassive black eyes; as nonhuman as he looked, at least he had features. “I want a guard on Room 40 at all times, until whoever is coming to take her away gets here.”

“Yes, doctor.”

Fleck signed off. He discovered that he still held the can of ad repellant in his hand like a gun, his index finger poised upon its button.

««—»»

After Fleck had reported the call that threatened further violence against his patient, the organization that would give her sanctuary in the Outback Colony, down south, flew two of its people up to Punktown earlier than planned. They arrived the day after the call, first meeting with the being and then with Fleck. They were both soft-spoken but dedicated-looking Choom women, native to this planet, quite human if one discounted the long lips bridging one ear to the other. One of the women bunched up her cheeks as she raised her great mouth in the bow of a smile.

“She has a final request of you, doctor, but I don’t know if it can be granted before we fly her out tomorrow evening.”

“What is it?”

“The eight orbs along her back…she would like to have them removed by you.”

“Removed?” Fleck was genuinely surprised. And then, oddly pleased. “They’re nothing but scar tissue, really; I’ll have her in an operating room within two hours. And while I’m at it?”

“Yes?”

“Ask her if she wants me to remove her tattoos and brands, too. Piece of cake, those.”

“We’ll do that, doctor. Thank you.”

“I only wish we had time for another surgeon, not me, to reconstruct her vocal organs.”

The Choom woman simply gave an elongated smile tight with regret, and nodded agreement.

««—»»

As Operating Room 22 was being hastily prepped, Fleck went on to Room 40 to examine his patient with this last task in mind, the Choom women accompanying him. The human security guard on duty, dressed all in black like a forcer, nodded curtly as he admitted them entrance.

Fleck explained to the vast entity that he had agreed to perform the favor she asked, the disk adhering to the back of her skull turning his words into whatever configuration her brain could interpret. She gave a rumble that he took for assent, or understanding, or gratitude. He looked to the Choom women, as if they might translate this noise for him, but they only smiled at him politely. He asked them to be seated on the other side of a screen he pulled out of the wall to give himself and the creature privacy.

Slowly…carefully…reverently, he reached for the buckles to undo the embroidered cloth that cloaked the series of tumor-like growths upon one segment of her upper surface. He had to walk around her body for access to the catches on the other side. In pulling the garment away, he had to tug a bit to get the straps from beneath her, but he was relieved that she raised herself up slightly on her unseen lower limbs to make it easier. She gave a huge shudder that rippled her caterpillar segments—whether from the strain, or mortification, he couldn’t determine.

“There we are,” he said, trying to keep up a casual one-sided conversation, to ease the encounter for both of them.

He held a wand scanner and ran it around the shiny globes, but he also tentatively reached up and touched them with his bare fingertips. The being gave another shudder, and a choked half-rumble, but did not try to shake off his hand…even when he lay his palm upon one of the nodules, feeling its smooth surface under his palm, and palpated it lightly.

When he squeezed, the being thundered inside but with a curious added element like a clattering purr mixed in with it. He saw the faceless head turn as much as it could on its ringed barrel of a neck. “You’re a bit on the coquettish side, aren’t you?” Fleck said quietly, then hoped it hadn’t been translated to her. “That’s what got you into this, isn’t it, my cheeky girl?” He whispered the last bit more softly. But as much as he made a joke of the situation to allay his discomfort, the fact was that he experienced the stirring prelude to his own arousal. He removed his hand and finished up with the wand alone, clearing his throat to give himself a shake.

Soon enough the being was in Operating Room 22, drugged and drifting toward the horizon of sleep like an oil tanker. She was being draped with cloths to isolate the first region he would attend before he worked his way to the nodes—the angry-looking tattooed curses like two-dimensional barbed wire that ringed her several nether openings. The imp of the perverse caused Fleck to imagine what it would be like clutching the caboose of this living train, pressed up to her ardently, but the image was fleeting and quickly subsided. It left him feeling jarred, however—ashamed, unprofessional. What would Midas think of him, if he knew?

Then again, Midas had said she was beautiful. Maybe he had meant it, after all.

Fleck pulled himself up by his bootstraps after that, became all business. The tattoos were deleted in no time, and the skin they had defaced wouldn’t even have to be bandaged. The drapes were rearranged, and next it was time to smooth out the family crests, her family’s and that of her exiled betrothed, who hadn’t been able to wait until after their marriage to seduce her. Fleck took up a stylus-like burning device, similar to the one he had used to erase the tattoos. Despite the more cool demeanor he had forced himself to adopt, he still felt a great satisfaction in eradicating all traces of ownership from his patient’s shining flesh.

««—»»

Fleck was finishing up after excising the last of the nodules (deposited into a tank of fluid for him to dissect later, out of curiosity) when a siren shrilled to life throughout the hospital. For one jolting moment, Fleck had thought his patient was coming out of anesthesia prematurely and screeching in pain.

“What is it?” he asked, glancing up around him.

Moments later, the voice of the security guard posted outside OR 22 came over a speaker. “Our guard outside Room 40 was just attacked. He was killed. No one saw anything, but they’re going to view the camera record.”

“Dear God,” Fleck breathed, looking again to the slumbering giantess and involuntarily resting a gloved hand against her covered hide as if to reassure her in her dreams.

“Three more men are coming down here to fortify this position. I can’t let anyone leave the room until then. The forcers are being called in to comb the hospital.”

“All right,” Fleck spoke up in reply. “But we’ve got to get her to the roof shuttles right away. We can’t take a chance. She can convalesce on the flight to the Outback—she’ll be fine, now.”

“Right, doctor…we’ll get a shuttle humming.”

««—»»

Though he didn’t have to, and his patient wasn’t yet awake for him to say goodbye to, Fleck saw her off as she was loaded onto a medevac shuttle so as to be taken to another, commercial shuttleport—from whence she would be flown with her two Choom benefactors to the Outback Colony for refuge.

Up here, chilly gusts moaned through the rooftops of neighboring tenement blocks with shops glowing colorfully at street level, and twisted like a flock of wailing wraiths between far larger office and apartment structures soaring so high above him that their tops were lost in cold mist. The wind fluttered his pale orange scrubs, ruffled his hair harshly, and even the coffee he held couldn’t warm him…so as soon as the craft had become no more than the other glittering motes floating in the sky, he pushed away from the roof’s blistered parapet to return to his work. He quickened his pace to outdistance an ad in the form of a young woman in skimpy underwear who came swimming toward him off a nearby billboard, no matter how fetching an apparition she was.

He felt terrible about the murdered guard—he’d been told, further, that the man had been killed horribly by several great bite wounds like those from a shark—but he was both relieved and gratified that his patient was now safely beyond the reach of her tormentors. Her family.

As he headed for one of the sheltered rooftop access ports, he saw another shuttle wafting in for a landing, carrying some new bleeding, crying, suffering victim of an accident or—more likely, for this city—atrocious act of violence. Each of the countless wounded passing through this building day after day after day had their own story, lived their own unique but not so unique drama. Could he, should he, try to empathize with them all? Would he ever stop wincing in his heart to see their rent flesh, the flow of their sustaining fluids, the tears on the faces of those that had eyes to shed them?

He descended to his small office, where the tank containing the eight severed orbs waited for him. He sighed, finished off his coffee, and set about extracting one of the cysts from its bath, setting it down, and opening it up with a hissing stylus device for visual inspection.

At its fibrous yellowish core he isolated the irritating seed that had been implanted to provoke this growth, rather surprised to see that it remained there intact, hadn’t broken down. In fact, when he viewed it through magnifying lenses, he saw that the black grain had symbols engraved on it, reminiscent of the branded family crests and the tattooed hexes.

This discovery made him want to pass the knowledge along to Midas, and he wanted to tell him about the being’s personal request from him. Anyway, had Midas been told about the attempt on their patient’s life, her successful evacuation? He glanced at a clock to gauge whether his colleague was on duty, couldn’t recall his current schedule, tried to buzz him here at the hospital. He got a message saying that Midas was not currently in the building. Thus, he tried a call to his home.

Dr. Midas’ home phone was set to a wide-open channel. This meant that any and all callers would immediately be connected. As a result, on his comp screen Fleck saw Midas’ apartment through the older surgeon’s comp screen. And what Fleck saw was Midas staring back at him. His eyes couldn’t be seeing Fleck in turn, however. Midas’s untidily severed head rested upon its ragged stump on the doctor’s blotted green blotter. A white, broken-off fang glinted in the edge of Midas’ torn lower jaw.

“Oh Jesus, oh…oh!” Fleck shouted, rolling back in his chair so abruptly that it ended up toppling over backwards, spilling him to the floor. He scrambled against a wall on hands and knees, turned to steal a peek back at the computer on his desk. The surgeon’s empty gaze had seemed to follow him.

In his home…in his home.

They couldn’t have expected to find their female there.

It wasn’t just her they wanted, then.

Like spitting on the steps of their temple, the father had said…undoing the marks of their justice.

Fleck’s comp started to beep. A call for him trying to get through. He wanted to stand up, rush over and expunge that terrible image from his monitor, but found himself paralyzed. Then, another sound. Was it gunfire? Gunfire outside his window would be nothing new, but it didn’t sound like it came from the streets below. Gunfire even in the ER was not unheard of—addled addicts, or gangs bringing their wars into the hospital that squandered its resources trying to keep them alive for the next turf skirmish. But the ER was four floors below, and this sounded closer.

His office door, unlocked, slid open, and into the room darted a naked dark figure as small as a child—a child’s skeleton. It sprang into a crouch atop the table where Fleck had been performing his biopsy. The tank was knocked to the floor, where it spilled its fluid and the seven remaining strange fruits. Fleck’s dissecting implements went clattering and skittering across the floor as well.

The volcanic crater of a face jerked in his direction. The maw’s webs fluttered wispily. But also, in there, Fleck saw a ring of white teeth rise up from just inside the tire-like lip. There was a gap where one of them was missing, but more rows of teeth waited behind the first. The creature, thin and nimble, bunched itself to spring down at him…and still Fleck was pinned in place by his terror.

Gunshots crashed into the entity, just before it could pounce, blowing it off the edge of the table. It slammed into a wall and convulsed against it horribly, its arms and legs drumming the floor while a spiraling blast of hawk cries whooped from somewhere on its body.

A black-garbed security man stumbled into the room, screaming, with a second of the skeletal things riding his back. Before the guard could point the pistol in his fist backward to blow the thing off him, this second creature clamped its pit of a mouth onto the back of his head. Fleck heard a terrible cracking of bone, and the guard’s screams became a liquid gurgle as he dropped onto his hands and knees.

Fleck’s paralysis was broken. Surgical instruments glimmered icily on the floor, and as he scrambled to his feet he snatched up the stylus he had been using to dissect the cyst. His expert fingers instantly adjusted its invisible beam to its highest intensity.

The thing on the guard lifted its head, the O-mouth streaming blood, tatters of meat caught between its teeth. The guard had sunk onto his belly, splayed, the gaping back of his skull now a mirror of his attacker’s face. Before the being could let go of its victim or rise, however, Fleck lunged forward as if with a sword and the stylus’ beam punched into the side of the entity’s head. He drew his arm downward, and a long wound sizzled open like flesh unzipped, smoking. Blood as vividly red as a human’s sprayed free. Fleck pulled back his arm, but waved the stylus again from the opposite direction. He caught the thing right across its narrow throat. Just as quickly as a wheezing sound started up from the being, it was cut off—as its head flopped backwards, thumped between its shoulder blades, nearly disconnected from the neck. The creature wilted atop the man it had killed.

Fleck straightened, looked across the room at the spasms of the first creature. The alarm siren that now filled the corridors and operating theaters and recovery rooms of this institute of healing blended with the being’s agonized howls. Fleck’s heart was pounding, and he was electrically trembling all over, but he walked toward the thing stiff and composed in appearance—ready to go to work. Ready to end yet another anguished soul’s suffering. He was even smiling slightly. The stylus was hissing in anticipation, like a monster on a chain, leading him along…guiding his hand. Ready to reconfigure both patient and doctor in a single stroke.

Mourning Cloak

Wozzy, some of the other prosties called her as a joke. Wozzies were an endangered baboon-like simian that lived in the Outback. From the shoulder blades of the female wozzies grew flaps of skin colored a garish red which they could extend and wave in the air, so as to entice males to mount them from behind. They had gotten their name for resembling, to some, the flying monkeys from the Oz stories.

But her real name was Helena and she did not like being nicknamed after a monkey. And her wings were not red, but a dark brown with yellow trim and a row of bright blue spots along the outer edges. Her designer had taken his inspiration from the wings of the mourning cloak butterfly.

Her wings were hidden now, folded away under her long dark raincoat as she sat in the high-ceilinged waiting room outside the administrative offices of the Solon. She paged through a fashion magazine, ignoring the similarly glossy catalogs which displayed the many women and the lesser number of men available here at the Solon. She herself had graced the cover of the main catalog, some years back. She had been proud of it, then.

The many-floored Solon was the largest legal brothel in the Earth colony of Paxton. The Solon was so named in honor of the first public official in Earth history to organize licensed brothels; in 500 B.C., in order to lower taxes and to raise funds for the erection of a temple to the goddess Aphrodite. Here in one structure was collected a menagerie of exotic beings both human and otherwise. It was a richly diverse museum of desire. There were several floors for B and D, S and M. There were baths and pools, bars and lounges, gymnasiums of sorts for the athletic. There were even ranks of hostesses, as the establishment had dubbed them, who were affordably priced for those of the lower working class.

Helena had been a high-class hostess since the onset. But in the past year, her price had been lowered to the next grade down. The first decline in her price since she had started here, fifteen years ago.

She glanced up at the desk. The woman behind it was talking into her headset. Helena looked at the time. She had to begin her shift in less than an hour, and hoped her personnel officer would agree to squeeze her in before then. The hostesses were expected to be punctual at the Solon.

Her right shoulder ached dully. She wished she had taken a painkiller, and they were back in her medicine cabinet in her tenth floor flat. Like all the hosts and hostesses at the Solon, she lived in an apartment on the premises. Her status enabled her to occupy a flat on her own; no roommate. But would that status change as well, soon?

It was becoming more difficult for her to fold and unfold her wings, of late, particularly the right one. It jutted a bit, didn’t fold as flat as it once had. Self-conscious, she had been wearing baggier clothing. She had not mentioned her worsening condition to her supervisor, and as yet it had gone unnoticed except for a few comments from the other prosties and some regular clients. And one of those had aggravated the problem a month back by wrenching at the wings as he drove into her from behind.

Wozzy, she thought.

It would no doubt be a simple matter for the design team to repair the wings, even if the difficulty proved to be in her brain’s linkage to them. Far less complicated than the team’s addition of the wings—part organic, part delicate mechanism—to her shoulder blades fifteen years earlier. But she did not care to have them repaired. In fact, what she desired was to have them removed.

“Helena?” She lifted her head. A smiling secretary in the doorway. “Ms. Gebhard will see you.”

Helena rose mutely, her face composed. Hers was not an emotive face, and might lead one to think it had been artificially engineered as well, though it was fully her own. She was chiefly of African descent, but this diluted over countless generations to the extent that her skin tone was very light, the effect being of a pale powder covering a somewhat darker tint beneath. She wore her glossy hair sleeked back close to her finely rounded skull, and braided thickly behind like a black cocoon. Her wide-spaced eyes seemed almost to wrap around her face, they were so cat-like and striking. She struck a regal figure, and despite the teasing of some of the prosties had always inspired an automatic sort of respect from most.

She had come to the Solon at fifteen, having been spotted by one of their talent scouts for her exceptional natural beauty. A runaway, Helena had been working in an unlicensed slum factory making black market handguns for barely enough money to rent a bunk in the factory’s barrack. Being underage, she was not allowed to become a hostess until the following year, but she was housed and educated for that vocation. And her personnel officer, Margaret Gebhard, had convinced her that she would be wise to allow some artistic embellishment of the type which distinguished the prostitutes of the Solon, and brought wealthy customers with a taste for novel delights. Helena and Gebhard had consulted with the design team, and Helena had become excited at the prospect of having fairy wings added to her body. This had been done to several other women and one homosexual prostitute in previous years, and she met with these individuals so as to examine their wings before she went through with it.

Yes, she had been proud of her wings then. Proud to be a Solon girl. It was an honor, like being a model. Some Solon women did model, and a few had gone on to become holofilm actresses. At sixteen, Helena had worn her dark hair in a tangled thick mane of curls, and with her slender limbs and delicate breasts, resembled some Maxfield Parrish painting come to life.

Fifteen years had passed. The lovely cat-like eyes now held a puffiness beneath. It made them sexy in a more mature way, but there was also a weariness implicit in them. And her figure had become more lush, voluptuous over the years, her hips fuller and once flat belly now more rounded. She looked less likely to take flight. There were those who would have preferred her now to the girl she had been. These signs of maturity could surely be forgiven and even commended.

But the wings. Her wings were arthritic. They were becoming crippled. Once a kind of symbol of poetic freedom to her, they had become a hindrance. As delicate as their membranes were, they increasingly felt like a painful burden.

The secretary opened the door to Gebhard’s office, then withdrew. The personnel officer smiled up from her desk, invited Helena to have a seat. After finishing up with some business at her monitor, she turned to give Helena her attention. “What can I do for you today, dear?”

Helena’s voice was soft and dusky, a night breeze of a voice. “I’ve been going through a period of…contemplation for several months.”

“Yes?” Leaning forward with false interest and a big grin the design team might have grafted on.

Helena’s eyes floated to a holopainting on the wall. It was of a forest, the ferns of its floor mottled with golden light which broke through the leafy dome. The light patches shifted subtly, the ferns gently moved; she could almost hear the ceiling of leaves rustle. Helena had never been to the woods of this world or any other. She had been on yearly group vacations with other employees. Ocean resorts. Even Earth, one year. But never to a forest. She wanted to get up, walk past Gebhard’s desk without a word and on into that holographic image. Walk in and keep walking. Its shadowed depths called for her to enter them. It was where a fairy belonged.

“I’m not happy here anymore, Margaret.”

“Ohh…Helena. Why do you say that? Please…if you have a problem you know you can always come to me and talk.”

“There is no special problem.”

“Is it because you’re hurt that your price was decreased? You can be honest in here…”

“That isn’t it. Not really. It’s just that I’m…I’m getting older.”

“You’re what, thirty?”

“Thirty-one.”

“My God, honey, you’re just a child! Orchid is fifty now, and look how lovely she is. And Barbara Cruz is almost sixty…”

“I’ve never been married. I’ve never had children.” She thought she saw a rabbit for a moment in the ferns as they shifted in the cool forest breeze, tiny shining eyes gazing out at her.

“Helena, really. After so many, many years, you know that women no longer need to define their existence by having children, or even getting m—”

“I’ve never had a boyfriend.”

A slight sigh escaped the personnel officer. “Helena, frankly, I was married and divorced. It wasn’t something to envy. Look; you’ve never had a boyfriend. But how many men have idolized you, over the years? Worshiped you, as a unique and beautiful creature?”

Helena said nothing. It was as though she had successfully entered that forest, and was only daydreaming this conversation.

Gebhard paused, then in a somewhat darker shade of voice asked, “Is someone influencing you, Helena? Is someone coaxing you to leave us?”

“You mean, a syndy or something?” she replied from far away. “Like the Teeb Family? No, it isn’t that at all. I don’t want to be a prosty any more. For anyone.”

“Then is it that man? Your client, Mr. Vetter?”

Suddenly Helena was back in the office. Bright, sterile. She turned her face toward the personnel officer. “Why do you say that?”

Gebhard sat back a bit in her chair as if satisfied. “It’s just that it’s been mentioned he seems to take a greater interest in you than seems…of a purely commercial kind.”

“He’s a friend.”

“A boyfriend?”

Helena did not respond. Her right wing, cramped and itching to spread open, was throbbing more sharply now.

“Helena, I’m sure you’re aware that you have five more years before your contract comes up for renewal again.”

“But in my contract it states that I can leave at any time if I pay you the averaged sum of the profit for the years remaining in my contract.”

“Do you know how much money that would be, Helena?”

“I haven’t touched my savings account in a year. And I have two thousand munits in my checking account. And there is my profit sharing, as well.” She swallowed a cue ball of saliva. “In total, I have seventy-two thousand munits.”

“Well, how about we calculate this. You make an average of three hundred munits a customer, and you entertain…how many? Five, six customers a day, average? We’ll just say five. Five times three hundred is fifteen hundred munits a day. Times five Terran years would make for a sum of…” Gebhard tapped at her comp panel. “You would generate a sum of two million, seven hundred thirty seven thousand, five hundred munits. Minus your share of approximately, what?, forty thousand. Subtracting monthly rent of one thousand over five years would be sixty thousand from two hundred thousand, which leaves one hundred forty thousand munits you will earn clear over the next five years. Where else could you make that money if you leave, Helena?”

Helena only gaped slightly at the woman. In all these years she had never really calculated the money she made for the Solon, and was shocked at the sum. Even now, with her price tag decreased. More than that, she had never really calculated the amount of money she made for herself. The Solon workers were allowed to use drugs. Encouraged, was more truthful. Drugs were made available at all times. Oh, the drugs available were carefully chosen so as not to destroy the workers’ bodies, but they were addictive, and expensive. The drugs made sure the hostesses and hosts never really saved enough money for much of anything else. It had been the most difficult part of saving, for Helena. Avoiding the drugs. Clearing the perfumed fog from her mind.

“So, subtracting your salary over the next five years, you would have to compensate us for two million, five hundred and ninety-seven thousand, five hundred munits in order to fulfill and eradicate your contract with us, Helena.”

Helena felt foolish. Foolish, stupid, and naive. She rose from her chair, turned to leave the office.

Gebhard said, “Helena, wait. Where are you going?”

Helena knew the woman thought she was running away. She smiled bitterly but did not turn back to face her. She didn’t want the other woman to see the anger expressed in her lovely eyes, or the start of tears that made the anger shimmer. “I have to start work in a half hour,” she said softly, and closed the door behind her.

««—»»

There was an outdoor café in one of the streets near the Solon, in this wealthy, well-policed sector of Paxton, and though it was raw and had been sprinkling on and off, Helena sat at one of the tables with a cup of coffee that steamed into the chill air. The chill made the cup of coffee a small, focused object of comfort, one she could hold in her hands.

Over the tops of intervening buildings she could see the Solon. Ringing its circular roof stood a dozen female angels with stylized figures and wings, their mock alabaster breasts without nipples and their arms raised to the sky of wet slate. Against that sky, they seemed by contrast to glow like ethereal giants, but their wings were stone and fused to their backs.

She had once found the statues awe-inspiring, romantic. Now they were ostentatious, revolting.

A woman sat down in the chair opposite her, and Helena looked to see that she was white, with blond-dyed hair protected from the rain by an expensive hat. She was attractive in a metallic sort of way.

“You’re Helena,” she stated. “You are remarkable, aren’t you?”

“Do I know you?”

“My name is Hedda Vetter.”

Helena said nothing for a moment. And then only: “Yes?”

“My husband comes to see you. Am I correct?” There were only those indeed remarkable eyes staring in response. “Do you believe that my husband is in love with you?”

Helena had been told that, while in David Vetter’s arms and even before and after sex. And how she had wanted to believe it. So desperately, that she had forced herself to believe it. There were doubts, insecurities, fears. Terrible fears. Yet now, to hear his wife raise the question herself seemed to make the possibility real for the first time.

Hedda Vetter smiled a smile like the raw air. “I know he tells you he does. I’ve had your last few meetings bugged, I’m afraid. I hired a detective who was able to get a transmitter into David’s clothing and past the Solon’s security scan. My poor dear…believe me, he doesn’t love you. David doesn’t love me, either.” A terrible spasm of a grin flickered across the woman’s face. “David is as incapable of love as those angels up there on your fancy whorehouse.” She motioned with her chin.

Helena still didn’t reply. The aromatic steam of her coffee was no longer a comfort…dispersed in the air.

“But for some reason, he does plan on leaving me for another woman. Oh…don’t get your hopes up. A respectable woman, not a lovely freak whore like yourself. I had their latest trysts bugged, as well. Do you want to hear?” Mrs. Vetter reached into her coat.

Helena raised a hand as if to ward off a killing gun. “No.”

The wife just ignored her lame protest, from inside her coat withdrew a tiny device which she rested on the table between them. She touched a key, and a familiar voice wafted into the damp air, as if they had summoned it in a séance, the recorder a pointing planchette.

“Oh…oh, you’re so beautiful,” that voice moaned in mounting rapture. “So beautiful…”

It was David’s voice, there was no question. But who was he speaking to, Helena or this alleged lover?

His wife touched another key, forwarding the recording until she found the spot she wanted.

His voice was back, and this time it was obvious who he was talking to: Helena. Because he had spoken these words to her numerous times…

“I want to take you away somewhere, sweetheart. I want to keep you someplace where only I can see you—touch you. I want to treasure you.” The small wet sound of a tender kiss. “I can’t bear not being with you all the time…”

Helena felt a secret triumph that Mrs. Vetter had to listen to these professions of ardor. Yes, Helena believed them more now than she ever had. And despite the wife’s avowals that David didn’t mean them, she too must believe that they were true, because the misery was naked on her blanched face and tight lips.

David whispered, “I just want to get you out of this stupid little hole.”

A second voice replied, “I want to get out of here, too.”

It was not Helena’s voice.

She stared at the tiny device. Stared as if her eyes would pierce it, see the faces from which the voices issued.

“I’ll take you out of this meaningless little existence, believe me,” David vowed.

“When?” asked the unfamiliar voice. Another little kiss. Helena flinched. She thought her eyes might melt that evil little machine with burning black rays. “When?” the voice repeated.

Hedda Vetter silenced both voices with a stab of her finger. “She’s a little customer service nothing in his company. That’s what he tells you, isn’t it? He promises to rescue you, doesn’t he?” Again, that awful tremulous grin. “It makes him feel like a hero. Makes him feel like a savior.”

“I think I should leave now,” Helena managed huskily, starting to rise. She found it difficult to rise with her body drained of all blood.

“Wait. Wait, Helena. Sit. I have a proposition for you. That’s better. This could be what you’re waiting for. I can give you what David has no intention of giving you.”

Helena gazed off at the swish of passing hovercars with the feigned composure of a seasoned actress, who was, however, more accustomed to feigning passion. “Which is?”

“Your freedom. I’ve listened to your…couplings, remember? Your sad, sad confessions of unhappiness. Your dreams of escaping your gilded cage…”

“Tell me what you want, now that you know what I want.”

“If David leaves me for that other lover of his, she will become quite wealthy. I prefer to remain the wealthier one of us two. But I would also like to be rid of this uncaring husband of mine.” Hedda Vetter’s hands shook as she struggled to pluck an herbal cigarette from its pack. “You see my dilemma? I want to be rid of him, but I don’t want her to have him.”

“Don’t ask me what you’re thinking to ask me.”

“I tried to pay my detective to kill him, Helena, but he refused. And I certainly can’t do it though God knows I’d love to. What do you need to make your dreams come true, Helena? Whatever it is, it will be worth the loss in order to keep all the rest. Believe me…he’ll never take you out of that place. But I can.”

Helena had turned her face away in disgust, tears capping the lenses of her eyes to make the sidewalk look even wetter. Curled under one of the unused tables was a homeless mutant with sparse white hair and great lidless eyes that he couldn’t blink or shut, even in sleep. He looked dead.

“Why would a man trick a prosty into thinking he loved her?”

“So you’d love him. Being loved gives you a power over the one who loves you. David loves to be loved, hon. And he loves power.” She lit her cigarette. “How much would you want, Helena?”

“More than you’d be willing to give.”

“David is worth forty-five million munits, my dear. You attract a high grade of clientele at the Solon, as you know.”“I would need two million, six hundred thousand munits,” Helena said in a low, dead voice.

“Oh, well, that is indeed ridiculous, as you say.”

“It’s what I need. If I don’t pay it to them, I stay. If I try to escape, they’ll have me jailed for breach of contract or they’ll make a bad accident happen to me. A drug overdose. Or I’ll fall in front of a hovertrain.”

“I appreciate your dilemma, but…”

“Well, you wanted me to solve your dilemma. If you can’t solve mine, then you can either kill Dav…kill him yourself, or let his girlfriend have most of that forty-five million munits.”

Hedda Vetter sighed, clicked her nails on the metal tabletop, and said, “Look, you know that’s just absurd. I can give you ten thousand munits. It’s enough to put a lot of distance between you and your vengeful employers. Enough to rent an apartment somewhere, get a start. Ten thousand munits for a moment’s work. You’ve never been that well paid, my dear, prime cut or no.”

The prostitute’s eyes returned inevitably to the Solon. The angels seemed to be watching her, spies, lest she stray too far from the building’s orbit. She croaked a small sound.

“What?” Mrs. Vetter asked, leaning closer.

“I said twenty thousand,” Helena repeated, not looking at her.

Hedda Vetter sat back again. “That’s better…much more realistic. That’s easily enough for you to take flight from your bosses, isn’t it?”

Take flight, Helena thought. Was that meant as a joke?

“But if you fail, or betray me, I swear to God that I’ll find someone who for just a few hundred munits will be happy to push a freak prosty in front of a hovertrain. Do we have an understanding?”

“So pay a few hundred to have some addict kill your husband, why don’t you?”

“Because I want him to die in a special manner.” She swallowed so hard that Helena heard the click. Her reserved voice even sounded as though it were struggling not to crack into pieces.

“How do you want him to die?”

“I want you to excite him, bring him almost to climax…almost, I stress…and then I want you to inject him with a paralyzing drug which I will give you right now. And while he is paralyzed, I want you to emasculate him and let him watch you do it. I want you to show him what you cut off him. I want you to hold it right before his face. I want one of his lovers to do this to him. I want him to feel…betrayed.”

Yes, Helena thought. Betrayed.

“And then I want you to kill him. At that point, you can shoot him, stab him, whatever is best for you. Just leave his body there in your room for your bosses to find. I can’t collect my inheritance without a body, and you can’t collect yours unless I hear proof that he’s dead. Twenty thousand is more than enough to compensate you for playing the role of a whore who just went crazy and killed her customer.”

As if under hypnosis, Helena nodded.

Vetter’s wife sat back in satisfaction, much as Margaret Gebhard had, several days before. “Tell me something, dearie. Do you love my husband?”

The prostitute did not answer. It was too private a question. But the answer was yes. She loved him as much as his wife loved him. She loved him enough to hate him.

««—»»

“God, I love you,” David Vetter moaned.

She sat astride him, his hands gripping her thighs, then moving with more urgency to her hips, then to cup her swaying breasts. Her hair was still bound tightly at her nape but her wings were liberated, spread wide behind her. The way he liked them. He must be able to see the glow of the sky out the window through their translucent dark brown membranes, like panes of stained glass.

“You’re the most glorious thing I’ve ever seen. Ever touched,” he whispered with the desperation of an obsessed lover, or a driven salesman. “Touching you is like touching a being other people can’t even see, don’t even know exists. You make me feel like you’re flying above me. Flying and carrying me with you. It’s like I never want us to land. Oh…God, baby. I want to ride with you forever. You’re my angel…my butterfly…”

He swallowed to wet a throat made dry by panting and lies. Helena watched his Adam’s apple bob. She thought she could see the veins pulsing in his straining neck.

“Tell me you love me, baby,” he begged her. He had a face she had once thought of as sensitive. As though a sensitive artist. A painter of forests. His husky plea sounded so sincere. “Baby…”

“I love you,” she told him. Many times in her work she had been asked to say those words. Except for David, it had always been a lie. She felt a bead of sweat run down the small of her back, like a redirected tear. Or a drop of blood from her agonized, crippled right wing.

“Oh…God. Honey…oh…I love you.”

“Liar,” she said.

“What?” Mild confusion cutting into the passion.

“Liar, I said.” Her hand had dipped between the mattresses, and came up with a hypopunch which she pressed into his neck. Her thumb depressed the button.

“Hey!” he said, and between his panicked attempt to push her off him and her own abrupt attempt to dismount she fell on her back onto the floor.

There was a cracking sound as her left wing was snapped and crushed beneath her. It was as though a bullet had been fired into her back to flatten against her shoulder blade. Helena sobbed aloud, rolled onto her side and fought to refill her lungs, the air blasted out of them.

After a few moments, through the red fog in her head, she realized that she heard no sounds from the bed.

With heroic effort, she got to her hands and knees. She was afraid to stand. Afraid to look into his staring, transfixed eyes. But she must…

Yes, his eyes were open. Unblinking. She had killed him, was her first thought. She shouldn’t have done it to his neck, or his wife’s calculated potion had been too strong. She drew closer timidly, afraid that he would suddenly bolt upright and seize hold of her.

But he only gazed toward the window, at the spot where she had been straddling him. She held a palm before his nose gingerly. After a moment, she felt the faintest warmth of a breath.

Her fury was a cold, mechanical one, like a volcanic emotion blazing inside a stiff-limbed zombie. Her rage was all the greater because she had been a prosty so long. An actress herself when desire needed faking, how could she have let herself be manipulated? How could she? Again, as in the personnel officer’s presence, she felt foolish, naive. Stupid. Stupid as a wozzy…

From her purse, she withdrew her surgeon’s scalpel. She had tried to find some sort of beam cutter that would not make a gory mess of things, but in the end the best she could do was a grimy razor knife used to cut boxes open.

Without looking at his face again, she bent to her task. She did not hesitate. She was a prostitute; she had been paid for this work…

And then the rich color came, broke free, hot and spattering, vibrantly flowing like the only live thing left in his unmoving body, eager to be free of his shell.

But she couldn’t finish. Sickened, horrified, Helena backed away, let the knife fall, the job only half finished. She dropped to her knees and vomited.

She lay curled a time on the rug. She listened to a pattering like rain. When at last she was able to rise and look at him, his expression hadn’t changed. But that tear…coursing down his cheek…

««—»»

There was a thirteenth angel on the roof of the Solon.

She, too, was naked. Almost as pale as they, now. Her wings, though broken, filled like sails with the high gusts of knifing wind. A new rain had begun to be wrung from the sky, and it pelted her. Paxton spread before her, its steel and ceramic, concrete and plastic stretching to the limits of her eyes. Oh, there were trees here and there. Parks, even. But she wished it was a forest she looked out upon. A fairy’s true home was the forest.

She knew just where she stood. She knew that when she dove, her path would carry her past the window which David even now watched blankly. If he could still see. She hoped he could. He had always professed to love her wings. So many times he had stroked them, kissed them, kissed her body through their silken blanket. Helena wanted him to see her in flight.

In flight, for the first time.

In flight, when she became free.

The Reflections of Ghosts

(graphic novel script)

PAGE 1, PANEL 1:

Caption: “Punktown…”

A “long shot” overview of the futuristic city of Punktown. It’s both sleek but crumbling, high-tech but retro. Cyberpunk meets Art Deco meets Dickens. Most vehicles in Punktown are hovercars, floating close to the street, though there are helicars, which float much higher. It’s a vast and dangerous city, a crazy-quilt blending of many cultures both human and humanoid.

PAGE 1, PANEL 2:

Caption: “Drew is an artist. Today he has chanced upon one of his works of art unexpectedly.”

We’ve pulled in closer. Drew, a handsome dark-haired goth-type in a long dark overcoat, coffee-to-go in hand, stands staring down at a nude male corpse lying fetus-curled on the sidewalk. The corpse has an emaciated figure and hairless skull, a sunken face with a rictus grin, and spiral brands on various parts of its body.

PAGE 1, PANEL 3:

Caption: “This work of art is dead.”

Close-up on the corpse’s grinning face, its eyes half rolled up. It has a spiral brand on its forehead. It should, to some extent, resemble Drew’s own face. It has a mole like a beauty mark on one cheek.

PAGE 1, PANEL 4:

Caption: “Drew creates the clones from his own matter. Sometimes he sets them free in the city. More often than not, he never sees his clone art again. It intrigues him that he has discovered this one. How did it perish?”

A view up at Drew, as if from the corpse’s point of view. Drew has that same beauty mark.

PAGE 1, PANEL 5:

Caption: “The mindless creature has chosen a fine place in which to die. Across the street from the Chrislamic Cathedral. An artistic composition that pleases Drew.”

Drew glances thoughtfully over his shoulder at an ornate but darkly foreboding church called the Chrislamic Cathedral.

PAGE 1, PANEL 6:

Caption: “He will return to photograph the creature later. For now, he has a commission to complete.”

Drew starts walking home along the street, leaving the clone behind.

PAGE 2, PANEL 1:

Caption: “His loft is high in an old warehouse, mostly unoccupied.”

Drew mounts a fire escape affixed to the side of a crumbling old building.

PAGE 2, PANEL 2:

No caption.

On his long, narrow balcony attached to the side of the building—on which there is a chair he sits in some nights to watch the city — Drew taps a keypad to open the dented metal door that will let him into his studio.

PAGE 2, PANEL 3:

No caption.

A view from inside the studio, as Drew enters. It’s spacious, both artsy but cluttered.

PAGE 2, PANEL 4:

Caption: “On into his studio laboratory, where amniotic baths gurgle with fermenting life.”

Drew moves into his lab area. Counters are covered in instruments and computers. In the foreground, close to our “camera,” are a few deformed embryos being grown inside small jars hooked up to cables.

PAGE 2, PANEL 5:

Caption: “Some of his clones make for interesting decor.”

A close-up of an especially ghastly clone, which is spiked to the wall as if crucified. It has a flat, manta-like body, like a cowhide nailed to the wall. A hairless head with a hideous, distorted face (but it has that distinctive beauty mark). Cables snake into its body here and there, keeping the pathetic thing alive.

PAGE 2, PANEL 6:

Caption: “He obliterates the minds of the clone art. However, it’s probably for the best.”

Close-up of a disembodied head alive in a jar of fluid. Its dark hair floats. Cables snake into it, bubbles rise. But the bodiless head is identical to Drew’s, right down to his mole.

PAGE 3, PANEL 1:

Caption: “ ‘Hello, Robespierre.’ “

Drew is seen tapping on the jar containing the head, talking to it. It looks at him mindlessly.

PAGE 3, PANEL 2:

Caption: “ ‘Good afternoon, Drew. You have a call.’ “

In the foreground, we see a computer monitor that says: INCOMING CALL. In the background we see Drew looking toward it.

PAGE 3, PANEL 3:

Caption: “ ‘Hey, Drew-man, I was wondering how that commission is coming along. My people are really anxious to see it…’ “

We see Drew and the computer in a “two shot.” The face of his friend Sal is on the vidscreen.

PAGE 3, PANEL 4:

Caption: “ ‘My people want a woman, Drew. Have you been able to do something with that?’ “

A close-up on Sal’s face in the screen. He’s youngish like Drew, and friendly enough, but more of a business type than our artist is.

PAGE 3, PANEL 5:

Caption: “ ‘Sal, it’s illegal for me to use any cloned material except my own. But listen, I won’t let your clients down. I think I’m going to outdo myself this time…’ “

Sal’s point-of-view of Drew, his face under-lit by the vidscreen as he stares into it.

PAGE 3, PANEL 6:

Caption: “Drew’s clones are often purchased by the rich, for sport and entertainment…”

We see a flashback; a rich man at a party proudly presenting a confused-looking male clone to his guests. The clone is nude (though this may be implied or obscured.) Though the clone has been distorted by Drew’s artistic techniques (it’s bald and has strange piercings and/or body modifications), it still has Drew’s face. There is an attractive rich woman in the frame.

PAGE 4, PANEL 1:

Caption: “The clones have a number of uses…”

The rich woman, disrobed, straddles the confused-looking clone on a bed. (This bedroom scene can be more implied so as not to be too graphic, if need be—perhaps even showing the clone standing in a bedroom while the woman begins to unlatch her bra.)

PAGE 4, PANEL 2:

Caption: “A ruby ring for the birthday girl.”

Back in the living room, the rich man we saw seen earlier holds aloft an expensive ring for all to see.

PAGE 4, PANEL 3:

Caption: “A little game first, however, so she has to work for her prize.”

In a closer shot, the rich man forces the ring into the clone’s mouth.

PAGE 4, PANEL 4:

No caption.

The rich woman, dressed again, grins and holds a knife.

PAGE 4, PANEL 5:

No caption.

In a two-shot, the woman jams the blade into the startled clone’s mid-section, beginning to gut it.

PAGE 4, PANEL 6:

Caption: “The gift has been retrieved from the living pinata.”

In the foreground, we see part of the dead clone (intestines bulging from a wound?), while the woman holds a dripping knife in one hand and holds aloft the dripping ring in the other, triumphantly.

PAGE 5, PANEL 1:

Caption: “Drew doesn’t approve of the fates of some of his artworks. But once they’re sold, it’s out of his hands…isn’t it?”

Drew sits in front of the now dead computer screen. He looks haunted, disturbed by what we have just witnessed in the flashback.

PAGE 5, PANEL 2:

Caption: “He must not dwell on these things. His latest commission — his masterwork—is ready for its unveiling.”

Drew has left the desk, wanders to go check up on his work in progress. There are larger tanks in this part of the lab.

PAGE 5, PANEL 3:

Caption: “Drew has wrought a miracle from the careful manipulation of his own genes. He has done something not even Nature can do…”

We see Drew peering into a large tank of fluid, and perhaps we see just a bit of the body in the foreground.

PAGE 5, PANEL 4:

Caption: “…he has created an identical twin of the opposite sex.”

We see, in close-up, a naked woman sleeping in the liquid-filled tank. Her long black hair billows and swirls like a sea plant. She is lovely, with that beauty mark on her cheek that reminds us how all these clones are a reflection of their maker.

PAGE 5, PANEL 5:

Caption: “And now it’s time to awaken sleeping beauty.”

Drew turns a valve, and the liquid starts draining out of the tank.

PAGE 5, PANEL 6:

Caption: “Drew makes a beautiful woman, if he must say so himself.”

Reaching into the dry tank, he moves a wet strand of hair out of the dreaming woman’s placid face.

PAGE 6, PANEL 1:

No caption.

An extreme close-up as the woman’s eyes have opened, large and dark.

PAGE 6, PANEL 2:

Caption: “Like the others, Drew has obliterated the creature’s intelligence. Though, admittedly, not as much as he usually does.”

We see Drew helping the confused, helpless woman out of the tank.

PAGE 6, PANEL 3:

Caption: “It’s been a while since a woman has set foot in Drew’s apartment.”

We see him helping her walk across the loft, his arm around her to support her. (If nudity is an issue, she could now be wearing a bathrobe.)

PAGE 6, PANEL 4:

Caption: “He can’t help but marvel at his own creation…her radiant perfection.”

They sit beside each other on the edge of his bed. She gazes at him mutely, and he is smiling subtly, entranced by her and proud of himself.

PAGE 6, PANEL 5:

No caption.

Drew reaches out and puts his hand on her cheek. She still stares at him, uncomprehending.

PAGE 6, PANEL 6:

Caption: “How can he resist? It won’t be the first time, in his loneliness, that he’s pleasured himself.” (If this is too extreme, the caption can be deleted.)

Drew leans forward and kisses her with fervor, wrapping his arms around her.

PAGE 7, PANEL 1:

Caption: “Though she seems not to comprehend, his living sculpture responds to the sensations he awakens in her new flesh.”

Drew and the clone make love in his bed. This can be as graphic or as subdued and implied as is considered best by the artist and publisher.

PAGE 7, PANEL 2:

Caption: “Come morning, his clone innocently studies his VT, while he studies her.”

In a robe, barefoot, the girl sits on his floor before a large television screen. Drew sits gazing at her thoughtfully, a coffee in hand.

PAGE 7, PANEL 3:

Caption: “Against the marring Drew has inflicted upon it, her brain seems to struggle with the words and concepts she’s exposed to.”

Close-up on the beautiful woman’s face as she is transfixed by the VT images. There is concentration in her brow, in her mouth, that suggests an intelligence is slowly dawning.

PAGE 7, PANEL 4:

No caption.

Close-up of Drew, watching her and looking very disturbed by his train of thought.

PAGE 7, PANEL 5:

No caption.

Drew stands up to cross the room.

PAGE 7, PANEL 6:

Caption: “Drew calls his old friend.”

A two shot of Drew sitting before his computer’s vidscreen. It starts to light up.

PAGE 8, PANEL 1:

Caption: “‘…I know I promised, Sal, but…I can’t part with this one. I can’t let her be raped, or cut apart, or shot, or whatever else they do to my clones.’”

Over Drew’s shoulder, we see Sal on the monitor.

PAGE 8, PANEL 2:

Caption: “‘It’s too late, Drew, you can’t back out or we’ll both lose our money on this!’”

Medium shot of the girl, her head in profile as she turns away from the VT to listen to what the men are discussing out of frame.

PAGE 8, PANEL 3:

Caption: “The clone takes in her surroundings with a dim but growing sense of awareness.”

We see the female clone gazing up at the crucified clone on the wall.

PAGE 8, PANEL 4:

Caption: “‘No, Sal…I’m sorry, but I can’t. Goodbye. No…goodbye, Sal.’”

The girl has risen, and stares into a jar containing one of those eerie little clone embryos.

PAGE 8, PANEL 5:

Caption: “‘Don’t be afraid…I won’t let anything happen to you.’”

Drew has come to the girl’s side, taking her hand.

PAGE 8, PANEL 6:

No caption.

His arm around her, Drew walks her to their bed.

PAGE 9, PANEL 1:

Caption. “Another night in the arms of his masterpiece. And another morning dawns in the city of Punktown…”

Drew lies in bed—alone.

PAGE 9, PANEL 2:

Caption: “…but his lover is not beside him.”

Drew has sat up, and looks concerned to have found himself alone in bed.

PAGE 9, PANEL 3:

Caption: “And while Drew has been deeply sleeping, someone has been busy in his lab.”

The crucified creature lies dead, slumped against the wall. It has been freed from its spikes, but a spike stabbed into its chest has put it out of its misery. Embryos lie dead on the floor, poured out of their now empty jars.

PAGE 9, PANEL 4:

“‘Oh my God…what have you done to my work?’”

Drew leaps out of bed in search of the woman. In the background, we see the door to his studio is wide open.

PAGE 9, PANEL 5:

Caption: “He spots her on his balcony, in the cold morning air.”

The clone stands against the railing, watching him. Her hair blows. She looks sad but determined. She holds something in her arms like a baby.

PAGE 9, PANEL 6:

Caption: “ ‘No, wait…don’t. Please…’ “

Drew has stepped out onto the balcony, holding up his hands to calm the creature.

PAGE 10, PANEL 1:

Caption: “ ‘I won’t send you away, I promise you! I promise!’ “

We see what she cradles in her arms: a close-up of the bodiless head Drew calls Robespierre. Its eyes are rolled up, since it’s obviously dead now. It’s as if she’s holding Drew’s own handsome head, with its beauty mark.

PAGE 10, PANEL 2:

No caption.

Close-up on the girl’s face. A tear rolling free.

PAGE 10, PANEL 3:

No caption.

The girl steps over the railing into empty space, still clutching the head in her arms.

PAGE 10, PANEL 4:

Caption: “ ‘Nooooo!’ “

Drew lunging forward frantically, but too late, grasping at air.

PAGE 10, PANEL 5:

No caption.

Drew rushes down the fire escape affixed to the side of the old warehouse building.

PAGE 10, PANEL 6:

No caption.

In a frame nearly identical to the second frame of the story, Drew stands over the crumpled body of the woman, curled like a fetus in the street, the disembodied head clutched to her. She is dead. And so is part of Drew.

The Color Shrain

- Three -

Specola couldn’t resist buying the shrain-colored suit when he saw the mannequin wearing it in The Maledrobe, in Punktown’s multi-leveled Canberra Mall. The mannequin was an animatronic Tikkihotto, turning slowly this way and that, smiling at and greeting customers near the store’s entrance. Like a live Tikkihotto, it appeared to be an entirely human male except for the realistically wavering ocular filaments which radiated out from its deep skull sockets, like worms from the eyes of a dead man.

The mannequin no doubt portrayed a Tikkihotto because only the Tikkihottos could accurately see and appreciate the color shrain. This was a much contested fact. Though everyone acknowledged the superior visual sensitivities and abilities of the Tikkihottos, the point was raised that some sort of enhancing spectacles or brain chip should allow nonTikkihottos to view the color as well. But not only was this not possible, but no scan or graphics program had been developed which could reveal the color to nonTikkihottos as the Tikkihottos claimed it should be seen. Attempts to achieve the desired effect had been dismissed by Tikkihottos. More controversial yet was the fact that the color could not be viewed even from experiencing the perceptions of Tikkihottos through virtual link-up and memory recording. The Tikkihottos countered that it wasn’t about scans or comprograms, chips or VR keyhole peeping—or even about their organs of vision, however complex. It was about how their Tikkihotto brains received, processed and interpreted what their eyes saw.

Specola’s eyes interpreted the shrain-colored suit as the color of absinthe. Not the artificial emerald green of absinthe wannabes, but the real stuff, with clumps of the poisonous herb wormwood floating in it like fragments of flesh in a bottle of formaldehyde from which some deformed infant had been removed. He had a bottle of authentic absinthe, killingly bitter, in his fridge, and its color was a more subtle and watery sort of green, with almost a touch of yellow, even of gray, about it. An unhealthy almost non-color. That was the best way he could describe his new suit: absinthe-colored. That’s how he would describe shrain, this fashion season’s most popular hue.

While he was completing his purchase, which included a dark green fez with a gold tassel to go with the suit (he couldn’t find a shrain fez, and hoped a Tikkihotto wouldn’t think his choice clashed), Specola heard a commotion toward the front of the store. As he began to leave for the mall proper, two security guards jogged past him…and by the time he reached the entrance, he saw them freeing a shoplifter from the grip of the Tikkihotto mannequin, who had seized him and held him until the guards could arrive.

««—»»

Specola had bought his bottle of absinthe from a bartender friend at his favorite elbow-propper, Café Prague, on Goitre Lane, an artsy little tributary of Forma Street. The painters, poets and holomakers who dwelt there, often in little cadres to afford the rents, benefitted from the frisson between the creative ether of their romantic capillary and the largely illegal commerce of the hot pulsing artery of Forma Street.

Café Prague was built out of blocks of greenish lucite, so that from the inside one could see the watery lights of the wheeled and hovering traffic passing along Goitre Lane, the occasional swoop of a helicar. Conversely, from the outside, the café’s interior glowed like an aquarium. In each and every brick-like block, which also composed the bar and even the ceiling and floor, there was a large insect entombed as if in amber. Huge moths, prehistoric-seeming dragonflies, nonterrestrial and mutated invertebrates the likes of which Specola had never seen even in books. It was almost educational, but sometimes a bit eerie after too much absinthe, however thinned with water and clouded with sugar. Once Specola could swear he saw the legs of a large millipede wriggling in waves like cilia.

In a booth tonight instead of at the bar, he stared at the wall beside him, into one block in particular, which fossilized an immense beetle with its carapace opened, from which spread several pairs of iridescent wings. It had multiple pincered jaws. Each block had its own very faint luminosity, maybe a subtle glow dye, so that their color was reflected on his face. The blocks were, to Specola’s mind, the color of shrain.

A finger flipped the tassel of his fez from back to forward. Swiveling around, Specola almost involuntarily materialized his automatic—a Scimitar .55 with a ruby red and sparkle-dusted enamel sheen—into his hand. He was too nervous about carrying a gun in a holster, kept it instead securely stashed, but readily accessible, in his Chest.

“Ooh. Look at you all glossed up like a real gangster.” It was Violet, and Blanca was with her as usual. Vaguely reluctant, Specola moved his mind away from the checkered grip of his pistol, which was neatly folded up like origami in the Chest. Violet had a frizzy thick cape of reddish hair and uncannily pale lynx-shaped eyes, a deep gluey kind of voice halfway between a drunken moan and a drugged chuckle. Specola had seen her playfully chase a friend down the street once and her run was laughably awkward; she didn’t strike him as remotely dangerous, physically. And yet, he knew enough to be as wary of her as he was of Blanca, whom he had seen break off the two front teeth of an unsolicited admirer in this very establishment by driving his head into the bar. Blanca was a few years younger than her partner, perhaps as young as nineteen, with her black hair gathered back and the surliest face he had ever seen on a woman, an unchanging expression except when she rarely smiled, which was even more intimidating. Her smoldering eyes were ever narrowed and one lid seemed droopier than the other, maybe from a blow whose damage had never been cosmetically repaired.

The two women slipped into the booth opposite him. Violet already had a martini from the bar. Blanca had a bottle of Zub beer. Violet slurred thickly, “Mr. Coelacanth seems to think you’ll be a real gangster one fine day, Fritzie. He was fairly impressed with the way you performed your last trick. So he has higher expectations for the next one.”

Specola shifted in his seat, glanced at a nearby table, and said in a hush, “I’m not sure I’d ever consider myself a gangster.”

“Ooh. Didn’t mean to offend.” From her purse, Violet slipped out her credit card. Specola watched as she tapped out a figure on its key pads, then produced his own and held it in his palm while she passed hers above his, covering an activation pad with her thumbprint so as to transfer money from her account to his. With a blip of sound, his card announced that the transaction had taken.

“Looks like you been spending some of your money in advance, Fritz,” Blanca said in her sneering sort of subdued growl. She pinched the cuff of his new jacket. “Expensive suit. You’re so handsome you make me moist.” She smiled. She had lots of teeth, almost like a native Choom. Smiling made her look possessed by a demon.

“Yeah, Fritz, nice.” Violet put away her card. “But the color’s a little drab.”

“It’s shrain,” he said, self-consciously.

Blanca vomited up a laugh. “Shrain. Man, you bought the emperor’s new clothes. That’s gray, man. Gray.”

- TWO -

When he was fifteen, Specola and his mother occupied an apartment directly below a woman and her brother. Agnes Rogers was a widow, and her brother Gerald Spell was an invalid of some sort who lived in her care. Until today, Specola had only heard his muffled coughs through his bedroom ceiling, had never seen or met the man.

On this afternoon, Specola’s mother received a call from her upstairs neighbor, asking for help. She had come home from work to find her brother on the floor, having fallen out of bed. That explained to Specola a heavy thump against his bedroom ceiling shortly after he’d finished his school programs, and now he felt guilty that he hadn’t told his mother about it. He waited for her to ask him if he’d heard anything, but she didn’t. Instead, she told him that Agnes had asked if he could come upstairs and assist her in getting her brother back into bed.

Agnes met him at the door, and led him through the alien apartment into Mr. Spell’s small, murky bedroom. In size and shape it corresponded to his own, directly below, but the most noticeable difference besides the figure on the floor was the sickly air, a sour milkiness born of cloistered exhalation. And the source of it was the milk-fat veal calf of a man, or almost man, at his feet.

He had pajama bottoms on, but his upper body was bare and bloated to a plastic sheen. His head hairless, eyebrows and even lashes gone, and the man’s weirdly thin arms were bent close to the body, hands pressed to the sides of his face in despair, blue eyes wide between some of the splayed fingers. Then Specola realized that the man’s hands weren’t pressed to his face, but fused there. As if his fingers had slipped beneath the skin. His left hand, in fact, was almost entirely absorbed to the wrist.

“I caught it on Ram,” the man rasped up at him, those blue eyes very aware despite the motionless turgescence of his body. “I was in the Colonial Forces there.”

“Don’t worry,” Agnes added with a sigh, squatting to slide her hands under her brother’s shoulders, “it isn’t contagious. Could you get his legs?”

Half lifting, half pushing him up the side of the bed and finally into it, they only almost dropped him once. The helpless dead weight of him, and the baby-soft fat of his body, were embarrassingly intimate. Agnes pulled a sheet over him in a brusque gesture of impatience, then stuck an adhesive disk to his shoulder and tapped keys on a monitor that stood by the bed. “Stop disconnecting this, Gerald. If you hadn’t, I’d have been alerted at work. And stop trying to stand up; you know you can’t.”

“I wasn’t. I rolled over. I was having a dream,” said Mr. Spell. “I could use a bigger bed.”

“And I could use more money. Fritz.” Agnes turned to him. “Can you keep an eye on him for an hour to make sure he’s all right? I’ll run and do some errands, pick up his medicine. I’ll give you five munits.”

“You don’t have to pay me,” Specola told her meekly.

Spell snorted oddly at this. His sister didn’t protest Specola’s offer, and left. Uncomfortable, afraid to look at the man for fear of making either of them self-conscious, he sat in a chair by the wall. Spell grumbled in a phlegmy voice, “You don’t have to baby-sit me, boy; I’m not trying to escape like she thinks I am. Go back downstairs. Or go watch VT in the other room, at least.”

“I’m all right here,” Specola said softly, pretending to look about him at framed photographs of some exotic, tropical place. Temples of red and gold nestled among blue-green fronds. In one holophoto, the fronds stirred and clouds scudded and several green dragonflies of prehistoric dimensions floated from one edge of the frame to the other. Eventually, his gaze dropped to a bureau against the wall beside him.

“Like it?” Spell asked. “I took that home from Ram with me. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

It was. The chest, or bureau, was small and delicate, made of a wood thickly lacquered an indigo blue. Gold trim, and gold-painted designs: insects flying across its drawers, and gold knobs shaped like cocoons of some kind.

“Both my sisters want it. Agnes, and my sister in Miniosis. When I die they’ll crawl over this rotting mushroom body of mine to get at that beauty. And you know what, boy?”

“What?” Tearing his eyes off the exquisite piece of craftsmanship, Specola looked over at him.

“I don’t want either of them to get their hands on it. Not that. I had that in my room on Ram for eight years.” Did the man’s blue eyes, through his blurring fingers, gaze over at the holophoto where the dragonflies flew into and out of sight in an endless cycle? “Eight years.”

Specola returned his own gaze to the lovely chest, where he could see a dim reflection of his face in its gloss.

“When I’m gone, I don’t want those hyenas to have it,” Mr. Spell husked.

- FOUR -

With the adrenalin that skittered centipede-like through his body, and the lopsided yawing of his stomach, the last thing Specola seemed to need before he went to the museum was a coffee. Nevertheless, he pulled his hovercar into the lot of a trendy little café, Mutter’s Java Bar. If nothing more, it was a means of stalling just a little bit longer. But then again, while he might be in the employ of Mr. Coelacanth, he was not strictly on a time-clock. Specola had had those kind of jobs. After a while, he had felt that he should have a time-clock by his bed. One by his toilet. He never wanted to scan himself into a time-clock again.

Warming a stool at the very end of the long curved bar, Specola spied on a woman seated a little bit distant from himself. She was a Kalian, lovely, her skin gray as smooth stone and eyes black like obsidian, with the religious scarring of her gender. But she was also a modern woman, scandalously lacking the blue turban meant to hide her thick black hair. Her beauty and her culture made her all the more unobtainable, all the more desirable to him. She glanced at Specola only once, met his eyes before he could divert them, before he could even think to smile, then looked away, dismissing him…even dressed as he was in his handsome new suit and fez.

She left a tip on the bar; a few coins. Then she left. Specola’s eyes followed her to the door, and when she was through it, returned to the spot where she had been. The heavy white mug. The spoon on its napkin. The coins.

Specola thought to steal the coins (not because it was money, but because it had been hers), but he didn’t want the waitress to be cheated. And didn’t want the waitress to resent the Kalian woman, especially if she were a regular.

Instead, Specola returned his gaze to the mug, and fixed it there.

In his mind, he saw the mug not even as a holograph, but as a two dimensional photograph. A photograph he then picked up in his hands. These astral hands then folded the photograph in half, creasing it neatly. Folded it again the other way. Then again. And again. Making sure the package remained tight, the smaller and smaller it became.

Then, when the folded up image was no larger than the size of a pill, he pressed it against his navel. The navel of his mind, like an orifice situated in the front of his brain. He pressed it there until it slipped inside him, into a dark interior, inserted the pill until it was gone, into his safe. His security deposit box. The place he had come to call, in his teen years, his Chest.

And indeed, it was as though the coffee mug was now inside his chest. Inside his physical body. But he did not feel its weight, its hardness. He did not, in fact, know where it truly was at this moment. Only that, wherever it was, it was a place that he owned. His very own little closet between planes. A crawlspace between space and time.

The waitress’ back was turned when the mug vanished, in a silent blink, from the counter top. When she turned, she scooped up the coins, collected the spoon and napkin, and rushed down the counter to refill another customer’s cup.

Specola slid his eyes back along the counter to the spot directly in front of himself, and stared at a ring-stained space just to the right of his own half-drained mug.

In his mind’s eye, his fingers reached into the small black depression. Like tweezers, they took hold of an object, a seed, and plucked it out. Then, both hands set to work quickly unfolding it, making it wider and larger, until he had entirely opened the photo and smoothed it out on the bar before him and saw the image of the coffee mug on it and then the Kalian woman’s coffee mug rested beside his own like the cozy breakfast mugs of a husband and wife.

The ceramic cup was still a third of the way full of black coffee. Specola lifted it to his lips and tasted it. Still warm. He savored the waxy flavor of the woman’s black lipstick smudge on the rim of the mug, before setting it down and digging out his own change…from his conventional pants pocket. Only in the Chest did he store large amounts of money—alongside his new and unfired Scimitar .55.

- FIVE -

The special exhibition at the Hill Way Galleries was entitled “Through the Eyes of Raloom,” and today was its first public showing.

Specola had taken a brochure so as to appear more the avid art enthusiast as he strolled the various large, interconnected chambers given over to the show. He even consulted the pamphlet when standing before certain pieces. The first of these—at the entrance to the exhibition—was an authentic, outsized, and dramatically lit iron bust of Raloom, the deity of an ancient Choom sect which had all but died out over the past several centuries. Like his worshipers the Choom—the indigenous race of this planet—Raloom sported a mouth sliced all the way back to his ears, held shut in a stern line. The eyes of the huge iron head were hollow, where fragrant oil lamps were intended to be burned.

The rest of the artwork in these rooms, more contemporary, was far less reverential. Even a layman like Specola found the iconoclastic approach of the artists predictable, and in its shock effects somewhat sophomoric, however accomplished the occasional piece was.

A piece entitled “Consecration,” by an artist named Rust Canker, was a (fortunately) sealed tank in the bottom of which rested a small plasticlay bust of Raloom not unlike the great iron bust at the entrance. Human excrement of a loose consistency would plop down onto the bust from above, slither down the solemn visage, eventually vanish into holes in the bottom of the tank, and then be recycled to drop down again through the hole above. Specola stepped back to feign appreciative absorption of the object—or perhaps out of fear of a sudden breach.

In much the same spirit were paintings like the one by Vanessa Teak, which portrayed Raloom as a pimp with a prosty on either arm, and the moving holosculpture by Allen Fishbein which showed Raloom sodomizing an Earth woman in a nun’s habit. There was Chicky Mummer’s Raloom in a boxing ring bloodying the nose of Jesus, and Calaca Tableaux’s Raloom, in a red bandana and bandoliers, was machine-gunning a row of children lashed to stakes.

Tediously, there was a haloed infant Raloom gnawing bloodily at a contented Mary’s bosom, by painter Lovey Ginsberg…in a glass case an actual Choom corpse’s head mounted and tattooed so as to look like Raloom, rendered by well known cadaver artist Toby Witkin…and (here Specola tried not to linger too long, lest he seem unduly interested even for a fan of the arts) the very last painting by the much-renowned Benedikt Angelika, who had passed away at the age of one hundred twenty-three only two months ago, before this exhibit could open.

In the limited time Specola allowed himself to view the object, the only object he had actually come to see, he spent more of it judging the traffic of museum visitors—and fretting over the open display of this particular item, even though there was a thick rectangular column not too far from it—than taking in the painting’s subject matter.

He saw now that it had been a mistake choosing opening day, an obvious one that a more professional employee of Mr. Coelacanth would never have made. Not that Mr. Coelacanth had any other employees with Specola’s unique talent. (Or, ability, as Specola preferred calling it. Talent would imply it was something he had learned, honed, like the playing of a violin or the painting of a canvas. He had discovered his ability the way one child realizes he can lift a rock that another cannot.)

But he had been anxious to get this over with quickly. And he had wanted to please Mr. Coelacanth. And he had wanted the money an appreciative Mr. Coelacanth would produce in return.

This would be a popular exhibit for some time, Specola reasoned. And besides, even if he took the painting in full view of everyone, how could they know he was the one responsible for it? They might think it had been stolen through a purely mechanical teleportation instead. Or they might even, impressed, believe that the disappearance was all part of the artist’s intention, and patiently (and vainly) wait for it to rematerialize.

Only when he moved away, into the mouth of a mellowly dim hallway to other exhibits, did he study the painting, reproduced in his brochure, the better to focus its image in his mind’s hunting scope. The painting portrayed the Choom god Raloom on his death’s bed, his eyes staring emptily at the viewer, hospital monitors arranged around him. Though Benedikt Angelika had no doubt captured here his anxiety about his own impending death, it was Specola’s old neighbor Gerald Spell that immediately sprang to his mind.

The pamphlet said that, like many of his paintings, Angelika had mixed some of his own blood and spit into the paints (in younger days he had managed semen as well). Specola hoped that Mr. Coelacanth was merely an art lover, or black market art dealer, and that he didn’t intend to clone Benedikt Angelika from the blood and hold him for ransom money.

But really, that wasn’t his concern. His task was simply to deliver the artwork to his new boss.

Specola saw himself living in a clean, spacious apartment in the Elysium Fields sector of Punktown. And he saw himself driving a brand-new hovercar, painted a fashionable if elusive shrain. These were things he could not fold up like origami and hide in the Chest. Well, perhaps the car—he had been afraid to “internalize,” as he often thought of it, so large an object. But even in the case of his expensive shrain suit, which he could have easily whisked inside him, he had wanted to pay with money. Only his handgun had he lately stolen for himself—simply so that it was not registered to him if, Raloom forbid, he ever had to use it.

As a boy, he had once stolen a toy from another child. The guilt of that act of lustful greed haunted him to this day. In fact, he was reminded of it now. As he was, probably, every time he “internalized.”

Somehow, stealing for another man seemed less difficult, less fraught with guilt. These were not items he himself coveted. Somehow, he convinced himself that he was only doing a job.

««—»»

Naturally, a number of the artists of these pieces had appeared today in person, so as to be admired by the public as their artwork was. Not pressing forward to meet them like others did, from a distance Specola watched some of them interact. There was Olo Radon, a Tikkihotto in a red silken robe who Specola thought glanced his way once and nodded in approval at his shrain suit. Holding a glass of champagne, his laugh as contrived a creation as his pulsing sculptures of cloned flesh, was Bud Buddy, who wore an obsidian-black suit of tight-fitting armor made, Specola overheard, from the chitin of one of the extradimensional Coleopteroid race. Walking works of art, some of these people were.

An odd headdress of sorts, bobbing above the heads of other artists and their admirers, caught Specola’s stealthy eye. Then, through a gap in the massed bodies, he saw its owner. It was Solomon Gulag, whose painting of Raloom sitting cross-legged in space and biting into this planet Oasis like an apple plucked in Eden had been rendered in childlike primary colors, crude and annoying. Gulag was attired in fairly conventional clothing, but like a bishop’s miter he wore a tall conical cage of sorts strapped to the top of his head. Something batted itself silently against the tight bars of this mobile silvery cage, and drifting a little bit closer, Specola saw what it was.

Inside the cage was a huge butterfly, fluttering about futilely every now and then when it wasn’t clinging to the bars and slowly fanning its wings. An eye had been painted onto each wing, unless it was a natural pattern meant to frighten off predators, but it looked too synthetic. And the color of the wings themselves. A gray that was almost green, or green that was almost gray, with just a suggestion of yellow lurking in its oblique mix. There was no mistaking it. At least as far as Specola could tell, the butterfly’s wings had been painted or dyed the color shrain.

An admiring woman poked her finger in at the butterfly, trying to stroke one wing. Specola almost called out to stop her. He remembered his mother once warning him that touching a butterfly’s wing would rub off pollen-like scales, damaging it. Solomon Gulag didn’t try to stop her, seemed to enjoy her caress as if it were directed at his own body.

Alarmed, the insect fluttered again, bashed itself into the opposite bars so that even from here Specola could hear the tick of its body, the dry rustling of its wings. He found himself more than annoyed, as he had been by Solomon Gulag’s painting. He wanted to go to him and yank that cage right off his head until its strap dug into him under the chin.

But he flicked his eyes back to the last painting of Benedikt Angelika. He had a job to do. He was wasting time. He was stalling.

With all these people, there was no other way to do this. His method was not to break in after hours, hang down the ceiling from a cord, dressed all in black. There were high and low tides of bodies around the painting but due to its very importance it was never unattended. He focused on it from a little bit behind the big square column, and only waited for enough of a lull in bodies to see it clearly.

Imprinted behind his eyes, the painting was now like a reproduction, a photograph in a page of a pamphlet. He took hold of that page and ripped it slowly free of its binding. Then, the page still in his hands, he began his meticulous ritual of folding, like the folding of a flag at a military funeral. In the background, a mild distraction, he wondered if his old neighbor Spell had had such a military funeral when he passed away not long after Specola had assisted him.

Smaller, tighter the packet. Then, the nimble insertion of it into the secret navel. And it was gone from the wall where it hung. It was hung, instead, on a wall in the black vastness of his Chest.

He thought he heard an “ooh,” perhaps of admiration, and maybe a gasp, some murmurs, but he was already turning away (not too quickly), already floating again toward that dim hallway, so as to wind his way out of the museum. But not far ahead of him, he saw Solomon Gulag again, with his cage of a headdress. Without even really making a conscious decision, but with the tiniest of smiles on his face, Specola locked his eyes on that cage. He took hold of it in hands stronger, more sure, than his physical hands. Almost out of spite, he folded it.

He had never tried internalizing a living thing before. He had been afraid of what might happen to the animal—or person—if he did so. But could the butterfly’s fate be any worse than it was now? If he unintentionally killed it by folding it, storing it away in the perhaps airless enclosure of the Chest, it would be a mercy.

As Specola left Gulag behind him, he heard his exclamation as the weight was relieved from his skull. He imagined the artist’s hands batting at his head like the wings of his stolen pet.

- SIX -

Specola’s apartment was in Subtown, that portion of Punktown which had been built below the streets to maximize space, since the city could only be built up and out so far. Subtown didn’t nearly extend to the limits that its upper twin did, but was still like a small city in itself. Due to Subtown’s fossilized sky of concrete, even the buildings were built on a miniature scale; mostly rows of flat-roofed tenements, many with shops at street level. Specola lived on the top floor of one of these buildings, cramped in a block of almost identical structures, although his was faced in stucco that was painted a lime green. Easy to pick out when one was stumbling home from the pub at the corner.

When he flicked on his kitchen light so as to make coffee, a mass of writhing white spaghetti in his sink began slithering rapidly down the drain, like a brain coming unknotted one convolution of tissue at a time. The first time he’d seen the worms, he had indeed taken them for noodles until he realized he hadn’t eaten pasta in a week. He smiled at the last of them as it wriggled down the drain, as if to say to them, go on, have your fun…I’ll be out of this place soon. An apartment in Elysium Fields, up in the sun.

Having manually started up his coffee maker, its vocal operation feature no longer functioning, Specola turned casually to his kitchen table so he could deposit there Benedikt Angelika’s final painting, of a moribund god Raloom.

His fingertips pressed into the tiny peephole that looked into a much larger, who knew how vast, chamber. His storage attic, his museum within. After a few moments, they felt the compacted pill that he had pressed in there, like drugs tucked into a smuggler’s rectum. His fingertips had the edge of the pill, and began to draw it out.

Somehow, as if it were too large though he knew it was no larger than any other he had ever placed inside him, Specola could not get the pellet past the opening of his visualized navel.

Forehead rumpling, he closed his eyes to better concentrate. Maybe he was tired. Maybe he was rushing the process, not focusing properly. He removed his ectoplasmic fingers, drew in a breath, then inserted them again. Deeper this time, widening the lips of the hole. Again, he found the pellet. Closed on it. Slowly, delicately this time, sought to extract it.

Again, it would not come clear. It lodged at the rim of the orifice. Not that it was too big to slip through—it wasn’t that. He opened his eyes, his brow even more furrowed. What, then?

This had never happened to him before.

Again he tried. Again he failed. Wait an hour, he told himself. Have something to eat. Take a nap. Try again in an hour.

He was too impatient, too alarmed to do any of those things. He darted, panic mounting, into another room. Tried again there, as if maybe some wavelength from a kitchen appliance might be blocking him though he had never experienced any such interference in the past. He attempted to withdraw the painting in his bedroom, to lay the painting of Raloom on his death bed onto his own bed. But it wouldn’t come.

Why was this happening? What could be different? Surely the gallery couldn’t have set up some sort of security barrier to prevent teleportation; after all, he had successfully removed the painting. And how could they find a means to hamper his technique when as far as he knew there was no one else gifted with such an aberration?

In the small living room, where he had again failed, Specola looked over at the aquarium screen saver program on his vidtank. Blanca or Violet or some other of Mr. Coelacanth’s representatives would be contacting him soon, within the hour, to find out how things had gone. To set up a meeting for the trade. Painting for a great reward of money.

What could be different?

Frantically, pacing the room like a panther in its too small pen, like a butterfly banging its wings against its cage, Specola replayed his visit to the Hill Way Galleries in his mind.

He stopped abruptly. A butterfly, banging its wings against its cage.

Never before, since even his childhood when he’d first stumbled upon his ability, had he dared to internalize a living thing. And now, today, he had done so—on a sudden, half-conscious whim.

“Ohh,” Specola exhaled softly. “Oh no…”

How could such a small thing disrupt his ability? How could it block the removal of the inanimate objects secreted away in the Chest? Desperately, Specola tried to remove the money he stored in there. He fared no better. He sought to extract the folded up package of his sparkly red pistol. He could not. At last, his fingers found the cage he had stolen off the very head of artist Solomon Gulag, the cage in which that poor shrain-tinted butterfly with eyes on its wings had been imprisoned. If he could only remove this object, that was in essence plugging the hole for all the others…

He took hold of it. He pulled it easily to the edge of the opening. And there, it would budge no further.

“Ohh, no…” Specola whispered.

- SEvEN -

Punctually, an agent of his employer called him on his VT not long after his last attempt to remove the Angelika painting. The face that filled his vidtank’s screen belonged to a man named Mr. Schism, whom Specola had not dealt with personally before but he knew he was of a higher rank than Violet and Blanca. Mr. Schism’s looming face was one big plastic smile, like a nearly realistic sculpture from the art museum. “Hello, Fritz.”

“Hello, Mr. Schism.”

“How did our errand go this afternoon?”

“Ahh…it went well…up to a point.”

“A point.” The plastic smile lost some of its Raloom-like width. “At what point might that be?”

“Well, I successfully bagged the groceries…” (in case the line was being intercepted) “…but, um…” Specola fumbled for more analogies to use “…but I can’t get the groceries out of the car.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s in the Chest. I know it’s there. But for some reason…” why give away the particulars of his foolish action? “…I can’t get it to come out of the Chest. It’s stuck in there.”

“Well, Mr. Specola—of course that won’t do,” said Mr. Schism mildly, though his smile had entirely melted by now.

“I’ll keep trying, of course,” Specola hastened to add, taking an unconscious step closer to the wall-length screen for urgent emphasis, “I’ll keep at it. But it…it’s going to take more time.”

“And obviously, you don’t know how much more time.”

“No, sir.”

“Well, Fritz…this is very disappointing, of course. We didn’t know that there could be a problem of this nature.”

“And neither did I! Look…I’ll keep trying. And I’ll call you.”

“No. Call Violet.”

“Right; I’ll call Violet as soon as I have it.”

“And you will have it, won’t you, Fritz? You will eventually have it?”

“Yes sir. It’s just a fluke. It’s never, ever happened before.”

“Bad timing, for it to happen now. Very well, Fritz. I’ll tell Violet to expect you. And hopefully—soon.”

- EIGHT -

Because he was hungry and had nothing in his fridge, but mainly because he had felt that his small flat was getting smaller and smaller, folding up like one of his pellets, Specola walked down the street to a Choom deli for a sprouts sandwich and a side of fried dilkies. Sitting at one of its few tables, directly in front of the window, he alternately watched vehicles pass in the street and customers queue up to the counter. A pretty college student wearing a T-shirt that featured the popular music star Del Kahn, both of them Earthers like himself, bought a salad and took it to a table not far from his. She dabbed at her mouth with her napkin, staining it lightly with flourescent orange lipstick, and lay the half-crumpled napkin to one side. Specola shifted his surreptitious gaze from her pretty face to the stained napkin. Only Del Kahn seemed to be watching what he was doing.

The young woman didn’t notice that the napkin was missing until she wanted to dab her lips again. She looked under the table briefly, then simply plucked another one out of a dispenser on her table.

Specola sensed the tightly folded bit of paper inside him. He imagined his astral fingertips could feel the paper’s texture, even the waxy residue of her lips, despite the tightness of the package. But when he began to pull it free, so as to unfold it, so as to materialize it beside his own plate, it wouldn’t come. Just wouldn’t come.

Was it more than just the insect, he wondered? Had it complicated matters that Angelika added his blood, his spit, bodily fluids to his paints? No: expired cells. Specola was sure that dead skin cells, oil from fingertips, had marred every object he had ever internalized. No: it was that butterfly. That poor, damned butterfly. First trapped by Gulag. Now trapped by himself, even more cruelly.

The college student left and he left shortly after her, though they walked in opposite directions, and when Specola got to the lime-colored tenement building he found two men sitting on its front stoop drinking coffee from disposable cups. When they saw him coming, one nudged the other and they stood up. For an insane moment, Specola thought he should turn and run in the direction that the young woman had taken. Instead, he fought to keep his step regular and casual, and he even smiled when the two men moved toward him. He recognized them now as two more of Mr. Coelacanth’s cadre; the taller man, with his eyeballs dyed metallic blue to match his metallic blue afro, was Jerly Bonsu, and the short muscular mutation with the ugly tapir-like snout and lidless, runny eyes was Jack Happy. Bonsu smiled—such friendly people in Mr. Coelacanth’s little family—and maybe the snort from Jack Happy’s little trunk held a similarly affable meaning.

“Hey, Fritzie,” said Bonsu in greeting. “We were worried when we saw you weren’t home. We thought you’d jumped a tube to the Outback Colonies or something.”

“No, here I am,” Specola chuckled, spreading his arms. “Just went for a bite.”

The mutant’s snout snuffled as if testing his breath for the truth in this claim. He grunted, “Any luck digging out that package, Specola?” He didn’t sound so affable after all.

“Not yet. I’ve been trying. I told Mr. Schism I’d call Violet if I had any luck.”

“That was two hours ago.”

“I’m working on it, really. I’m experimenting. See, I can still take objects in…I just can’t get them back out again.”

“Maybe you need a plumber,” Bonsu joked.

“Maybe I should do a little plumbing for you,” snorted Jack Happy.

Specola found himself backing off a step, and raising his hands. “Gentlemen, honestly, I’m doing my best.”

“How do we know that you’re telling the truth, huh, Specola?” the mutant grumbled. “We can’t see inside you. How do we know you didn’t turn around and sell that painting to someone else?”

“What? I wouldn’t do that! Do you think I’m stupid enough to pull something like that on Mr. Coelacanth?”

“You wouldn’t be the first stupid person whose eyes he had to gouge out with a spoon.”

Jerly Bonsu put a calming hand on his partner’s tattooed arm. “Fritzie…look…Mr. Coelacanth trusted in your ability. Now you tell us your ability is flawed. It’s bad news, you understand?”

“Of course, I agree, but I’m not hiding the painting from him. I’m not going to sell it to anyone else. I’m not an undercover forcer trying to trap you. I want this thing out of me as much as he does. I want my money, after all, right?”

“It’s just that Mr. Coelacanth has a buyer waiting, Fritzie. And that man is impatient, too.”

“Like I said, I can only do my best.”

Jack Happy caught hold of the tassel hanging from the top of Specola’s fez, and jerked the hat off his head. Spinning the hat around by the gold braid, he snarled, “You’re incompetent, Specola. You’re crapping everything up.” He batted Specola across the face with the spinning green fez. “You’d better have good news for us soon.” He spun the fez off into the air, sent it rolling into the gutter. A passing hovercar made it roll some more, its felt attracting grit and dirt.

“I want that as much as you do,” Specola replied in a tremulous voice, containing his anger, but not quite his terror.

He watched the two men stroll away, Jerly Bonsu smiling at him half-apologetically, half-mockingly over his shoulder.

- NINE -

That night Specola lay on his fold-out sofa-bed staring at the blank screen of his living room ceiling, and with his powers of visualization he imagined the worms that at this moment must be squirming in his sink’s basin—the way his thoughts squirmed in his basin of bone.

Should he get out of bed right now, throw on his shrain-colored suit (he had left his fez in the gutter), pack a suitcase and grab the next tube to Miniosis, until he could perhaps teleport to Earth or some other of its colonies? But if he did that, and assuming he wasn’t tracked down and murdered for sure (Mr. Coelacanth had associates everywhere), he would never collect the great sum of money he had been promised for the delivery of the Angelika painting. No. He must buy more time, so that he could try and try again until at last he cracked his stubborn safe. Maybe he was just sick. Maybe he was under too much stress. Maybe he needed to adapt his technique somewhat.

Finally he fell asleep. He dreamed he was hooked up to beeping life support systems. He dreamed he was the Choom god Raloom, wasting away, drained of his godly powers.

- TEN -

He stood on the flat roof of his lime-green tenement building, the solid sky above him criss-crossed with plumbing lines and sheathed power cables, the burnt-out shell of a dead helicar wedged in the groin of two support girders. A dome-capped ventilation fan whirred behind him, giving off a warm laundry smell, and there was a soiled mattress up here, discarded wine bottles and spent bulbs of anodyne gas. He had rested a small glass of cloudy absinthe on the crumbling parapet, like a gargoyle watched the traffic and the pedestrians seething below him.

He saw them coming, and he did not flinch, did not gasp, though his heart beat faster in the cloistered darkness of his chest. He felt as immobile as a gargoyle, as a sculpture in the Hill Way Galleries, as an insect frozen in a chunk of amber. It was Blanca and Jack Happy. He wished it was Violet and Jerly Bonsu, but he supposed it wouldn’t have made much difference.

When they had crossed to his side of the street, Blanca caught Jack Happy by the arm and pointed up at Specola. He thought he might wave to her, to keep them in a civil mood—but before he could, together they lunged more quickly toward the front steps of the narrow building. Specola turned from the parapet, faced across the roof to the kiosk-like structure that gave access to it.

Jack Happy burst out onto the roof first, with such a momentum that Specola feared he might back up too much, back right over the lip of the roof. Again, as yesterday, he held up his two hands. “I’m still trying,” he blurted.

“And we’re here to help you,” snorted the mutant. “Maybe I can shake it out of you if I dangle you over the side.”

Backed up as far as he could go, Specola started edging sideways instead. “Please…don’t.”

Blanca grinned ferally. “Maybe we can give you some incentive to try harder, Fritzie.” She had a Ramon dagger with a long, straight blade in her hand. “Maybe we can even cut it out of you. Have you ever tried that approach before?”

They’re only trying to scare me, Specola told himself desperately, edging sideways more rapidly now, but not so rapidly as to inspire them to run. Maybe, he thought, maybe I can scare them, too…

He stared hard at the dagger in Blanca’s fist. A Ramon dagger like his old neighbor Gerald Spell might have seen during his eight year military stint on Ram.

But Blanca lurched forward then, to jump the distance that separated them, and Specola’s eyes raised from her dagger to her face.

Blanca was younger than Jack Happy, perhaps as young as nineteen, with her black hair gathered back and the surliest face he had ever seen on a woman, an unchanging expression except when she rarely smiled, which was even more intimidating. Her smoldering eyes were ever narrowed and one lid seemed droopier than the other, maybe from a blow whose damage had never been cosmetically repaired. He saw this pretty/surly face as if in a photograph his eyes snapped at that moment, in one fast blink. A photograph that he took in his two hands. But in his desperation, with so little time to fold, he did something he had never done before. He crushed the photo, instead. He balled it up in his fists, rolled it into a tighter ball between his palms, and crammed it as hard as he could into his navel to make it fit.

The Ramon knife was gone. But so was the hand that had held it. Blanca had vanished, leaving no one between Specola and Jack Happy. If he had had eyelids, his eyes might have widened in amazement. Instead, he stopped in his tracks and hissed, “Fuck!”

Specola raised his eyes to him, and despite his fear, he smiled. For a rare moment in his life, he felt a confidence planted on solid metal legs. He felt like a god.

Jack Happy was reaching around behind him, to something tucked in the back waistband of his pants.

Specola tilted his head forward slightly, locking his eyes on those of the mutant.

Jack Happy’s gun was thrust out into the space between them where Blanca had been. It was a Scimitar .55, like Specola’s lost gun, but it was green with gold flecks instead of red with silver.

It looked like a toy.

- ONE -

The assignment had been for the third grade class to make a diorama out of a shoe box, in which to display the prehistoric life of this Earth-settled planet, Oasis.

Some of the children had really risen to the occasion, displaying a great deal of creativity and imagination. Kasey Higgins had decided on an underwater scene. The bottom of her diorama was lush with plants of scissored paper, and stones glued in place. Hanging on strings from the top of the shoe box, as it rested on its side, were a variety of armored fishes and cephalopods in tightly coiled shells. When eight-year old Fritz Specola stooped to gaze into this little cardboard aquarium, he gently blew on the mobile of two-dimensional sea life to make it stir like swimming things.

Boris Sobol had taken the route of airborne prehistoric animals, also suspended from the ceiling of his box on strings. As he knelt to inspect this display, Fritz blew these animals also: a kind of giant starfish with broad webs between its five arms, lifted on steamy volcanic updrafts (Boris had sculpted a volcano out of plasticlay), the living parachute of a jellyfish, and a group of ribbon-like creatures in a living aurora borealis. Where Kasey had drawn her aquatic life on cardboard, Boris had done so on paper, and these lighter animals floated more dramatically when blown upon, Fritz a giant looming over them, like a deity breathing life into his creations.

Chris Neale had elected to conjure up the insects of an early prehistoric period, before the evolution of higher forms. He had sculpted his animals out of plasticlay, but they bristled with legs made of wire or the broken teeth of combs. There was a kind of giant dragonfly, a huge millipede-like creature, and an immense beetle with its carapace opened, from which spread several pairs of wings made from iridescent cellophane. It had multiple pincered jaws.

There was a lot of noise in the classroom, a lot of exclamations of admiration from student and teacher alike. Fritz didn’t expect many accolades for his own humble project, however; he was not at all artistic. For his own faux terrarium, he had merely glued several of his toy prehistoric monsters to the floor of his box and stuffed some torn lettuce in there for foliage, crude volcanoes and clouds drawn in crayon as a background.

He was relieved to see he wasn’t the only child who had used this technique, however, when he reached the very last diorama. It was the one belonging to Simon Pearl. Like him, Simon had simply drawn a background of trees on the bottom of the box, though his clouds were glued puffs of cotton ball. His animals were also plastic toys, not even glued to the floor of the diorama, but simply rested there. But Fritz was more intrigued with this display than any other, because he loved prehistoric monster toys and he had never before seen these particular figures.

All three of the miniature beasts were beguiling, but especially the bipedal Shredder, as it had been nicknamed because of the four scissoring bony blades like flower petals surrounding its circular mouth. It had eyes shaped like those of an Earthly oriental, and Fritz liked how its front arms were poised with their lobster-like pincers gaping wide for attack. The plastic Shredder was a kind of gray color, though maybe green. Maybe even with a little bit of yellow in the mix. An elusive color, almost like a non-color, but it seemed the perfect color for this monster that Fritz ached to pluck out of the diorama and tuck inside his shirt.

He couldn’t do that. Someone would see him. And it would be wrong.

But he stared at the monster, and stared at it, wishing he could steal it, fantasizing that he could quickly hide it away close to his chest before anyone could see him, and he blinked, and he saw the Shredder vividly in his mind but he no longer saw it inside the shoe box. It had disappeared.

Startled, almost in a panic, Fritz stepped away from Simon Pearl’s diorama. He moved across the room as quickly but as inconspicuously as he could manage. He hoped no one would think he had taken it. He hadn’t. He had never touched the strange-colored toy. He glanced back at the box as if he might see the figurine there again. Maybe it had only toppled over from him breathing on it.

But he knew it was gone, because later he heard Simon cry out in surprise. And then, at the end of the day, from across the room, he saw Simon crying and being comforted by their teacher. Their teacher, who sternly addressed the class and advised them that whoever had stolen Simon Pearl’s toy had been very cruel to do so, very greedy and thoughtless, and had better think about returning it right away.

Even before Fritz found the toy inside him, even before he found a way to get it out of him again and handle it, and play with it, he felt guilty. Somehow, though he had never until that day suspected his ability, he had known from the moment the toy vanished that he had been responsible.

Even after he was able to materialize the toy again, however, he did not return it. It was part greed. It was part fear of being caught as the culprit if he returned it, even anonymously. But because he was afraid his mother would ask him where he had got it, he always returned it to the dark toy chest inside him when he was done secretly playing with it behind his closed bedroom door.

Though it seemed unrealistic that Simon Pearl could be traumatized by so small a loss, Fritz always felt that Simon looked despondent after that day. That is, on those occasions that he could bring himself to look at him.

After not so long a time, Fritz no longer brought the toy out to play with. He preferred to leave it hidden, unseen, in the gloom like a buried corpse.

- ELEVEN -

After searching the flat in vain, Violet and Jerly Bonsu finally decided to try the roof of the lime-colored tenement building, and as soon as they emerged from its kiosk-like access structure they knew they had found not only Fritz Specola, but their two missing associates.

Specola’s back was propped up against a big ventilation fan, a bullet hole above his right eyebrow. The blood had flowed down across his white shirt, saturating it, and had pooled in the lap of his expensive suit. It wasn’t difficult to figure out how he had died; Jack Happy lay not so far away, a green Scimitar .55 in one fist. But Bonsu could not figure out how his friend had died. He knelt down beside him, rolled him over, detected no mark of violence. He looked up at Violet, who was crouched down beside Blanca. She didn’t seem to be having any better luck at ascertaining her friend’s demise.

Violet stood, looked around her some more, and then exclaimed, “There it is!” She rushed to the parapet, against which a painting was leaning. It was a painting of the Choom god Raloom, terminally ill in a hospital bed.

“That lying little fuck,” Bonsu mumbled, looking over at Specola again. Then his eyes fell on an odd piece of furniture a little bit distant. He could understand that soiled mattress being here, but why would anyone bring such a beautiful chest of drawers up to this roof? He drew closer to it for a better look. Maybe this was worth bringing with them, too. The chest, or bureau, was small and delicate, made of a wood thickly lacquered an indigo blue. Gold trim, and gold-painted designs: insects flying across its drawers, and gold knobs shaped like cocoons of some kind.

Something from the planet Ram, Jerly Bonsu would guess. Idly, he opened one of its drawers. He was glad he did. There was a thick wad of bills in there, which he tucked into a front pocket after making sure Violet wasn’t looking.

In another drawer of the beautiful chest he found a Scimitar .55, red enamel with silvery glitter. He pulled this out and tucked it in the front of his pants.

In a third drawer, he found a plastic prehistoric monster, a Shredder, and he held it before his eyes only a moment before he tossed it away from him, where it skittered to a stop against Specola’s leg.

Atop the beautiful indigo chest was a conical silver cage, and in this cage was a dead butterfly, though the eyes painted on its unmoving wings stared open against their background of shrain.

Trash

The boys scrambled across the robot hovercleaner like monkeys, affixing chains, whooping and shouting. They had cornered it in an alley, and blocked its path. It was programmed not to run people down in the course of its sucking up and digesting of refuse.

The chains were hooked to the rear of two stolen hovercars, and with these the boys began to pull the massive robot onto its side. One chain snapped, but finally with a creak and then a crash, the old machine lay on its side like a beached whale.

But in toppling, the robot had fallen atop a boy named Keith, pinning his legs under its great hulk. He screamed in agony…and then in terror, as an insect-like appendage unfolded from the metal beast and reached for him. It was going to feed him into its maw…

A second limb unfolded, and using it for leverage, the robot was able to prop itself up just a little, as if raising a bit from a deathbed.

The cleaner robot pulled Keith out from under it. Then it fell back onto its side heavily. The two arms did not move again.

Before driving Keith to the hospital in one of their stolen hovercars, the other boys stood around the dead machine, staring at it mutely, uncomprehendingly. They could not give expression to their feelings…any more than they could fathom those of the machine they had destroyed.

Behind the Masque

“I found myself within a strange city…”

–Poe, Eleonora

In the same story, Mr. Poe also said that, “the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence—whether much that is glorious—whether all that is profound—does not spring from disease of thought.” Now, I am not saying that I think Diego Kaji was a profound man in any way. Though he was a man of great wealth, I do not think he was responsible for producing anything glorious, unless one would consider his large house perched atop the Turquoise Tower to be glorious (many consider it an aberration). But there is no doubt that he was a man of great intelligence and creativity, a man with distinct esthetic tastes however unconventional—a man with a personal vision, however diseased that vision might seem when perceived through the eyes of others who are not Diego Kaji.

Nothing more about Diego Kaji would ever be learned from his own lips. Only by observing his environment, his possessions, could we the living hope to understand him now. Diego Kaji had committed suicide by hanging himself from the chandelier that overhung the foyer of his mansion atop the Turquoise Tower in Beaumonde Square, one of the most affluent sections of the city of Paxton.

Paxton is a colony city on the planet we Earthers call Oasis. We call Paxton (the “Town of Peace”) Punktown, because this is a more fitting appellation. Crime and violence run rampant in the streets of Punktown. The perpetrators are human and nonhuman, mutant and automaton alike. Their crimes are often as shockingly alien as their physical bodies; who could imagine that a race of beings from one world might want to run up to you in the street and paint a yellow stripe down your nose? While this might merely exasperate and inconvenience you or I, it would be the greatest of malicious thrills to this race, akin to rape. Not so terrible in our eyes, you might well say. But you would doubtless be more alarmed to have a member of another race, from another world, leap upon you from an alley mouth so as to clip off one or both of your thumbs, because these resemble closely their jointed phalluses, and are used to concoct aphrodisiacs in unlicenced apothecaries. Yes, it can get very unpleasant, downright dangerous down on the street level of Punktown. It should be no surprise that a man of wealth would want to raise himself high above these flood waters, to sequester himself safely atop a plastic turquoise edifice protected by armed security teams. Though no security team had, in the end, protected Diego Kaji from violence by his own two hands.

His crime upon himself was not so alien, so unfathomable, I suppose. Kaji was on the Board of Directors of a company that produced cloned laborers. These clones were cast from a master set of six males; convicts sentenced to death had signed over rights for their likenesses to be produced for these purposes. Because it was illegal, you see, to produce clones of living people at that time. The moral and ethical questions of cloning slosh back and forth endlessly like amniotic solution in a lab tech’s beaker. For some years, this cloning operation made its owners quite wealthy. But lately there had been scandals, not the least of which was the murder of Ephraim Mayda, an important union figure, at the hands of an escaped clone. It developed that this seemingly vengeful clone was actually the pawn of larger forces. There had come investigations; the media had made much of the controversies. And so it was that Diego Kaji—my employer—stood upon the railing of his balcony and stepped off into empty space with a cord around his neck, causing the great glistening chandelier to sway and scintillate like a crystallized jellyfish, its glittering tentacles tinkling slower and slower as the little circles Kaji traced grew smaller and smaller. He was dangling utterly still when Lan, one of the servants, spotted him in the morning. Her screams summoned others. I myself saw him before he was brought down.

I can’t say I liked Diego Kaji. I respected him, because I was paid to do so. I did appreciate it when he would inquire about my wife’s welfare after she was mugged and beaten by a group of youths; he even gave me paid time off, sent a basket of rare fruits and a veritable rain forest of endangered blossoms to our apartment. But truthfully, I felt better when I did not encounter him face-to-face in my movements about his mansion. I was thankful that he spent most of his time at his office within the cloning operation. But he had an office in his home, as well, and one time he called me into this room to share a glass of brandy with him. I accepted his invitation, though I respectfully declined the cigar he offered. He seemed slightly drunk, and maybe a little bored. Perhaps even lonely. He was between wives. His girlfriends changed so frequently that I could scarcely remember what name to address them by. At any rate, this night he was chatty, and the chat went pleasantly enough until he patted my knee, and the patting became a rubbing, up and down my thigh. Taken by surprise (though, having seen some of the parties at the house, I shouldn’t have been; no, not at all), I stood abruptly and excused myself. I was afraid that he would dismiss me from my services for rebuffing him, but the next day when we chanced upon each other in one of the hallways he simply smiled at me and said hello as cheerfully as if I had dreamed the whole incident.

I was not close to him, not a butler or bodyguard or chauffeur—though he had those. I was the head of maintenance at the mansion. I made sure that every machine, and every living body in my team, was performing its task properly. The cleaning crew answered to me. It was my responsibility, too, if a fountain of wine stopped spurting. If holographic nude male dancers with arrows jutting out of them like Saint Sebastian started dancing in slow motion or speeded up motion or vanished like elusive ghosts altogether. I did mention that Diego Kaji was a man with unique tastes? Jaded tastes. There was enough to do to keep me and my people and my several automatons busy every day. The house he had built upon the flat roof of the Turquoise Tower was very large. It was a synthesis of every style that appealed to him, a Frankenstein’s monster of grafted parts that somehow all came together in an unlikely whole. Towers and gables and gargoyles. There was an adjacent chapel with a steeple and it had stained glass windows that portrayed beautiful naked women with bat-like devil wings. Various wives and girlfriends had posed for these demonic likenesses. Many an orgy had taken place upon the chapel’s floor, with Diego Kaji presiding over the events at the altar.

I had never participated in these revelries; had done my best to be out of the house when they occurred, though I was always on call. My wife and I had once received a formal invitation to one of these events, ostensibly a Halloween costume party. On the card, it was called a “masque.” Somehow my wife and I were able to decline, and thankfully my employer had never invited me to attend one of his special events—as a guest—again. It was disturbing enough to have to replace a circuit chip in a pleasure robot while lovely teenage girls looked on and giggled. Unsettling enough when I was called upon to lower a man tightly bound in a cocoon of black leather when the chain he dangled from would not deliver him back to the floor.

Maybe I’m a prude, in my old age, but I’m not so sure that even in my youth, unmarried, I would have fit in with the revelers at Diego Kaji’s “masques.”

After Kaji’s suicide there was a lot of activity of a less pleasurable variety about the big house. Lawyers removed computers, while business partners fretted in the background. Ex-wives squabbled over ownership of this painting or that sculpture; a two thousand year old Kodju vase was dropped and shattered during one particularly ugly confrontation of this type. And I was given duties. Very solemn duties. They were considered an extension of the cleaning I had always overseen during my employment—which I knew was soon to end.

“Good man, Rod,” one of my boss’s former business partners muttered, patting me on the back for no apparent reason, as I met him coming out of Mr. Kaji’s home office. This was the cocooned man I had helped get down that time.

I erased the memories of pleasure robots. I removed and burned holograph chips of underage nude mutant girls cavorting. It gave me satisfaction to see some of these things destroyed at last, though another part of me was disgusted at myself for aiding in their disappearance. For cleansing Diego Kaji’s memory.

“Ahh…did you get rid of that enema robot yet?” one former guest of the house whispered to me outside the huge, two-leveled library. He was obviously a little embarrassed to ask.

“Yes sir,” I assured him.

“Oh,” he said, and I realized he was disappointed, had wanted to take it with him. He nodded at the threshold to the library. “Those books of erotic art prints from Ram?”

“I think Mr. Blemish took those,” I reported.

“Bastard,” the man mumbled, whisking away, maybe hoping to locate Mr. Blemish elsewhere within the mansion.

I had things to do, at that moment, in the library. I entered it. I touched a code on the keypad by the door frame. I heard the big double doors of violet Ramon wood clunk into place, firmly locked. Then I turned to face the high-ceilinged room.

My boss had been a voracious reader. He loved books as artifacts, as objects, preferred to read from actual volumes rather than off a monitor. This room held quite the collection even now, however much its contents had already been pilfered and censored. I approached a locked cabinet set into a section of wall that was not filled with built-in bookcases. This showcase held some of Mr. Kaji’s most prized, most priceless volumes. One of the items displayed behind glass was an original copy of the Pioneer magazine, in which was printed the story The Tell-Tale Heart, by Edgar Allan Poe—Diego Kaji’s very favorite author. But it was from the displayed copy of The Stylus, a literary journal edited by Poe, that Kaji’s people had managed to isolate and extract the correct DNA. Oil from a thumb, a bit of rubbed-off cell, still clinging to the brittle paper even after all these many, many years.

I was one of the very few people in the mansion atop the Turquoise Tower who knew about the switch hidden under the lower edge of the glass showcase’s frame—and the foremost of those few was already dead. I flipped this switch, and with barely a whisper, the section of wall in which the cabinet was set swung inwards. I passed through the narrow portal, and pushed the hidden door back into place.

The corridor was too cramped, too chilly, and quite unnecessarily murky. Into its walls, cells were recessed. One cell had only bars to contain its occupant, but it had no occupant now. Mr. Kaji had sold his clone of motion picture actress Jayne Mansfield to a friend. I didn’t know much about her other than that she and her little dog had been killed in an automobile accident in the 20^th Century. Mr. Kaji had acquired her “death car” and it was still displayed in his adjacent garage, a miniature museum of motor vehicles. It was from this that he had had her blood, and thus her DNA, extracted. I remembered seeing her at some of the masques. Even when she was attired—in some glittery sheath which her ample curves seemed ready to burst—her eyes flailed the walls, the ceiling, the groping people around her in a vacant drugged panic. She had less than the mind of a little dog, now.

I was relieved that I would not have to destroy her, scrub her like a lichen off the face of Diego Kaji’s tombstone. Despite all that I had done for him over the years, I had never had to kill a woman—even a cloned woman—before.

The next cell had a clear wall, like that glass showcase containing several of Poe’s works, and from within a man seated on the closed lid of a toilet gazed out at me warily. He had a glittering, shimmering cape around his shoulders against the chill but otherwise he was naked. A white jumpsuit lay crumpled, soiled, upon the floor. The crusted tray of his most recent meal rested atop his bolted-down table. The man made a little grunting sound; hardly the beautiful music that had achieved his fame. His hair drooped in greasy black spikes across his forehead, though the blue-black color was dyed; the servants saw to this when they drugged him and washed and shaved him. Some clones were placid, but this one tended to fight, become violent, thrash around madly like a martial artist fighting off an army of assailants. I’d heard he’d been gleefully tortured one night after breaking the nose of one of Mr. Kaji’s female guests.

“Hello, my man,” I said to him soothingly. Sadly. I had listened to the man’s music; one could hardly miss it, as Kaji had often played it loudly. But the sadness I felt was not for the destruction of a great talent. That talent had died many generations ago. No, the regret I felt was more like that one would feel bringing a sick pet to the vet to be put down. Not even that regret, really, because this had been Mr. Kaji’s pet, not mine.

I activated a separate clear panel set seamlessly into the larger cell wall, and it slid aside. The man grunted again, looked ready to rise from the toilet, perhaps expecting one of the treats he liked, such as a doughnut. Instead, I raised the handgun I had brought with me, a Scimitar .55, metallic gold with a dusting of red sparkly flakes, and pushed its barrel through the opening and pointed it at the man on the toilet and like the angel of death I squeezed the trigger. The gun emitted only the slightest poof. The man emitted only a soft third grunt before he toppled off the toilet and began melting.

Only when he began dissolving, the blue-glowing plasma spreading rapidly and consuming his cells, did the clone begin to kick and thrash in a mindless attempt at survival, but it was much too late. I slid the opened panel shut again to avoid smelling the fumes as the plasma did its work. The thrashing became a subdued writhing as the man lost shape under the corrosive blanket, his limbs shortening, and then there was no more movement but that of the plasma itself. It being a blue plasma, it only consumed organic matter, and so all that was left when it was finished was the man’s shiny cape, barely stained and empty on the floor of the cell.

The next few cells were empty (for which I was again grateful) except for hanging chains or props and decorations related to their former famous occupants. Maybe Diego Kaji had foreseen his own end longer ago than anyone had suspected, and had thus let his most trusted friends take some of his clones. His most tight-lipped friends. I knew that other angels of death would be visiting some of his less trustworthy friends, but fortunately that was not on my own list of chores. After the last of my work was done in this mansion, this Graceland atop the Turquoise Tower, I would take my savings and move my wife to another city, another colony on another world, perhaps, and change my name and pray that no other servant of the late Diego Kaji ever deemed me a threat to the sanctity of his memory.

I came to the only other remaining clone. The second of the two men that for whatever reason had been idols of Diego Kaji. Perhaps he had thrilled to this man’s stories of madness. Been deliciously chilled, or even titillated by their brooding atmosphere. I had, at my employer’s prompting, read a number of his stories and poems and I could understand Mr. Kaji’s enthusiasm more so than I could his affinity for the music of his other idol. Maybe Diego Kaji was a frustrated author, a would-be singer, and all his own accomplishments were merely what he had made do with.

The other cells I had passed had once been closed off by invisible fields of force; nearly invisible, at least, in that they gave off a pale violet tint so that one would know they were activated. But this cell had no bars, no glass wall, no magnetic field. I came to a wall of brick, as if some of the other servants had already set to work sealing off all traces of this jail. This zoo cage. The front of the cell was entirely bricked up except for one small area at the level of my eyes. This was open, and I could smell an unclean odor wafting out even before I brought my face close to it warily.

No arm shot out to rake at my eyes. No spittle came flying at me. In the murk beyond, lit only by the holographic flame of a mock candle fixed to the wooden table top, I saw a man dressed in a torn and shabby black suit, seated before the candle. Its wavering glow gleamed off his bulbous forehead, made black pools of his mournful deep-set eyes. Though his hair was in disarray and he was due for a shave, his small mustache still looked neat. The head lifted slightly. Silently. From within their pools of darkness those eyes contemplated me, almost as if there were actually a sharp mind behind the waxen mask of fame. The living Halloween mask that this entity had worn to the masques, to the delight of Diego Kaji’s guests.

You can clone flesh and bone, but you can not clone talent, or memories. We knew who this man was. But he did not know. This man was as lost as he had been when for five days he had disappeared, perhaps in a drunken stupor, on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland in the year of 1849 AD.

One of Mr. Kaji’s guests, a movie producer, had once asked him if he might borrow this clone, so that it might help script a film for him. Imagine the selling hook in such a project! But my boss had only chuckled and wagged his head. Even if he had been willing to make known to the public the unlicenced cloning of this man, the creature was simply not capable of writing so much as his own renowned name.

“Hello, my man,” I said to him softly, the Scimitar .55 hanging down by my leg. There was enough room for me to point it through the gap in the wall of mortared brick, but I did not raise it yet.

It was not illegal, technically, to clone a dead man. But any cloning for personal—rather than industrial—use was against the law. Though clones did not possess the rights of us “birthers,” there were still too many sticky areas of the legal ground. There were groups that cried out in protest at the mistreatment of clones, at any use of clones. One could not legally clone himself in the pursuit of immortality, and surely Mr. Kaji hadn’t, or else why even kill himself in the first place?

Unless that had been a sham to throw off the authorities. Perhaps the hanged man was the clone. Perhaps Diego Kaji, the Diego Kaji with a mind and with memories, was already in another city, another colony on another world.

Yes, I thought. Though I had not been a friend to the man, a close associate, not even a butler or bodyguard or chauffeur, I felt I knew him well enough that this was a real possibility. It rang true to me. I knew the man not so much by his words to me, but through his taste—his environment, his possessions. His possessions such as this clone. This human being.

Regarding the man in the tomb, as he regarded me, I thought again of the works of his I had read and been so impressed by.

Squeezing and unsqueezing the handle of the gun resting against my thigh, I said aloud, as if to remind an amnesiac of these words, as if teaching them to a child for the first time: “He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel…”

I paused, as if to gauge whether these words moved the cell’s occupant in any way. He appeared not to have even heard them, however. He seemed deaf, no matter how intense his stare upon me. I felt suddenly uneasy, as if he were the one observing a prisoner, as if I were the one behind this brick wall gazing out at freedom. As if he were taking mental notes so as to pen a story about me at some later date. As if it were he considering my ultimate fate.

I could not bring the gun up. If only he had grunted, animal-like, as the other clone had. If only his eyes had been less clear, however shrouded in their darkness. If only I hadn’t read his stories.

I swore under my breath, very softly, as I unsealed the door that was hidden skillfully within the wall of brick. I swung it open, and gestured to the man at the table with my free hand—still gripping the pistol in the other should he come flying suddenly toward me with his arms extended, his fingers like talons. I remembered the occasion when Mr. Kaji’s bodyguard had had to shoot an undrugged clone who had gone berserk at one of his masquerades. This female clone had attacked her master himself, who was dressed as a kind of robot, I guess, that night—a man of tin. The clone had been a person named Judy Garland, cloned just to the age of a young girl in pigtails. Poor child. I had been relieved to hear that she had been returned to the ether, in a sense.

After several long moments, the man rose from his chair. I gestured to him again, and at last he came shambling toward me. Out through the narrow doorway into the dimly-lit hall. He allowed me to take him by the elbow, and guide him back through the passageway toward the locked library.

As we walked together, as if to train him, I said, “Lo! Death has reared himself a throne…in a strange city lying alone…”

In the vaulted, balconied library, I unlocked that glass cabinet and removed the copies of The Stylus and the Pioneer, and I stuffed these yellowed crackling magazines into my companion’s jacket, as he submitted dumbly like a child having a winter coat pulled on. Then, I unlocked the library doors of violet Ramon wood and peeked out into the hall. When I thought it was safe, we emerged. We moved thus stealthily while we made our way to one of the doors that exited the mansion built atop the Turquopise Tower in Beaumonde Square in the colony city called Punktown.

The man and I descended to street level in an elevator. With my hand still on his arm to guide him, we continued along the avenue. Finally, we came to a little café and went inside for coffee and pastries. It was an upscale café and the man’s stink attracted the disgusted eyes of neighboring patrons but I ignored them as my chewing companion did. After we had eaten, we returned to the street, and I tucked a hundred munits in bills into the man’s pocket, though it was mostly a gesture for my own sake. I wasn’t convinced he would know what to do with them. I even considered giving him my gun, but that was too unrealistic a gesture so I kept it in my shoulder holster.

And it was on the street that we parted ways. I clapped him on the back, as a cowboy in an old movie might slap a horse to get it moving away on its own. Stumbling a few steps, the man glanced back at me. And then I watched him as he staggered along, until his famous bobbing head became only one of many anonymous bobbing heads, and I lost sight of him down at the end of the great avenue. Swallowed in the flood that Diego Kaji had sought to rise so high above.

Sometimes I think of the man pushing a crumpled bill across a counter to buy himself a drink at a bar, a bottle at a store. Most often, I think that his body must be lying in its own filth in an alley, its skull bashed in and its pockets turned out. Or perhaps he isn’t dead yet, not yet, but lies there starving and sick, muttering unintelligible words—like a young bride dying of tuberculosis as her grieving husband helplessly watches. Muttering garbled words like a dreamer suffering fevered nightmares and talking in his sleep, as if to convey those nightmares to whoever will listen.

In his delirium, clutching his magazines against his breast. And I hope they are soaked in spilled wine. Stained with vomit. Caked with congealing blood. Because I know it would agonize Diego Kaji to see those prizes defiled in that way. He, who would think nothing of defiling a clone of Jayne Mansfield, would have cried out in horror just to know that I had removed them from their case.

If Diego Kaji did indeed escape into the world alive, he should have thought to take those publications with him. But perhaps he had been afraid to give his greatest secret away by doing so…the secret that he, too, walked the streets still breathing when he should really be a dead man.

In any case, those objects were in the hands of the man to whom they truly belonged. And if those pages crumpled, and those hands decayed, then that was the way things belonged, too.

Forge Park

There was still a row of factories that cast long blue shadows over the tracks at the train stop called FORGE PARK, which had once been the name of this industrial complex before most of the companies relocated their operations to the Outback Colonies, where labor was cheaper, crime and vandalism less rampant than it was here in the Earth-established colony dubbed Punktown.

Most of the plants were abandoned, sealed up, but one—Polymorph Sprayform—had been turned into a nest of inexpensive apartments/studios for artists, called the Forge Park Artists’ Collaborative, with the help of government art grants.

It was apparent even from the outside which of the factories had been thus converted. Most of the jagged chasm wall of buildings was bleak gray, blighted with long scabbed streams of red and green corrosion, with windows either shuttered over or—if impervious to the stones and bullets of vandals—simply black and gaping like the mouths of fishes stacked in a Tikkihotto market. Fans still twirled idly in vent ports at the stirring of the wintry breeze, and pipes thin or thick ran across the sides and faces of several factories like the roots of ancient trees grown around a coffin. Rhodes Bioflux Implants, formerly tiled in gleaming white, now shed its scales to drop and shatter. Small factories rode piggyback atop larger plants like symbiotic organisms, which had not been able to keep each other alive. A barracks for workers had once rested atop the old Occhipinti Gelplasts building, but it had burned down to a charred and spiky crown atop the head of that deceased Tikkihotto company. There were arching sprays of graffiti, red as blood — and some of it was blood. But that was the work of amateurs, compared to the embellishments of the Artists’ Collaborative.

Their building, toward the far right end of the looming row, narrow and five floors in height, had been entirely painted a pale banana yellow color. Gelatin molds had been affixed to the outside surface of the plant, at the ground level, before the painting had taken place, so that they seemed like exotic tumors in the form of smiling fish and bunches of grapes. Bordering each of the front windows on the second floor, also added before the painting, rows of baby doll heads had been attached. Their blankly open eyes and cherubs’ lips shone a contented banana yellow. A lacquered ten-foot long rifuubi fish, with its vast sail and sleek eyeless head, was fixed at about the third level, its crimson skin now a calming yellow. At the fourth floor, the graceful yellow arms of female manikins reached out into the air as if to test for rain. And finally, at the fifth level, long yellow banners hung from short flagpoles, and snapped in the gusts of wind. Each bore some interesting pattern or design, white against the yellow fabric and thus easy to miss. Some looked like stylized stars, others almost like calligraphy.

««—»»

Edwin Cribbage couldn’t have drawn a stick figure with a HoloStudio 9.0 program to do the work for him—but he still had a critic’s eye for beauty, and found that most of what the hand could painstakingly render still did not compare to the blind juxtaposition of cells that nature used as its pallette. Nothing painted, sculpted or holoformed in the building he tended and serviced could compare to the work entitled Jessika Inkster.

If her name was a pretentious fabrication, her appearance was not. She had the good sense to leave her charms as given—there were none of the fiber tattoos glowing like neon below the skin, temporary henna tattoos obscuring pretty faces like black veils, hair spray-coated in plastic or lightweight metal. Most of the young women who lived at the Collaborative used themselves as canvases. But Jessika was, in Cribbage’s limited range of reference, a soft Renoir amongst sharp-cornered Picassos.

He now crouched at the heater unit in the fifth floor hallway, with its worn carpet and a dissonance of blended music blaring from various open doors. A similar barrage of smells assailed him—paints, chemicals, both legal and illegal smoke. His breath misted before him as he labored at the heater. The whole fifth floor was out; a dozen angry calls had summoned him this morning. They blamed him, no doubt, as the tenants saw him more frequently than they did Mr. Ythill, who managed the Collaborative and collected the rent.

He was spreading more tools out in front of him on the floor like surgical instruments when he glanced up for the twentieth or thirtieth time at the closed door to Jessika Inkster’s flat, and almost bolted up from his crouch like an animal startled to flight when he saw Jessika padding toward him, a heavy blanket draped around her like a cape.

She was smiling. It wrenched his heart like one of his tools, as if to dislodge it. She smiled often, though, he noticed. At all these younger men. These talented young men. He had had to admit to himself that it was no special blessing meant for him. But that didn’t make it any less effective. Perhaps, as natural as her prettiness might appear, she had perfected these smiles in the mirror for long years, in a subtler command of body art. Her smiles creased her normally large brown eyes to gleaming slits. Her face was oval-shaped and narrow — framed by long straight hair of an unremarkable brown but with the sheen of youth — with a high forehead and a tapered point of a chin. She was not beautiful. Not gorgeous. He would call her cute. Pretty at best. Achingly cute. Heart-stoppingly pretty.

She was small—came just to his shoulder—and delicate as a bird. He thought it possible to gently close his hand around her slim neck. But he had noticed, whenever he had opportunity, that her breasts were almost disproportionately large for her slender frame. Yet they were not falsely firm and globular, again were a soft and natural gift granted by an oblivious nature. In the summer, he had come as often as Mr. Ythill had allowed to repair the cooling systems. Jessika had favored tight shirts that clung to her heavy breasts, and which more often than not were cut to expose her smooth midriff. She had worn shorts to reveal sleek legs, sandals to bare pretty childish toes. She was nineteen. A flower. He was only twenty-nine, but he felt as old as the rustiest of the factories in Forge Park.

But here she was now, unmistakably coming toward him, her smile meant for him at least at this moment.

“Hi, Ed,” she said cheerfully. Weren’t artists supposed to be angst-ridden? Weren’t repairmen supposed to be as contented as grazing livestock? “Why did you shut the heat off on us?”

He wanted to joke back to her, “So I’d have a reason to come see you again,” but instead he fumbled several half-started sentences before settling on, “Mr. Ythill should really have this whole system replaced.” There—at least he had properly distanced himself from his boss.

“Well, we know that will never happen.”

He noted that despite her bulky wrapping, her ankles and feet were bare. He wondered if she were naked beneath the blanket, but of course he knew better.

He said, “Mr. Ythill is supposed to be coming out here in two weeks, with some business associates from his world. I think they want to look into buying some of the other properties in Forge Park.”

“Really. Oh no…I hope they don’t try to build this up into some kind of shopping mall or something, and drive us out. It’s not like Ythill makes a lot of money on this arrangement.”

“I know. I hope not,” he aped foolishly.

“Where are they from again? For a long time I didn’t even know he wasn’t an Earther—though I guess he is a little too pale, even for a pale human. You don’t see many nonEarthers that are so human looking. The Choom, of course…the Kalians. A few others. It’s amazing.”

“It’s a planet called Carcosa. In the Aldebaran system.”

“I think some great past race sowed species from planet to planet from one original handful of seeds, you know?”

“Like—a god?” Cribbage said, looking up at her as if she were his deity.

“Something like that.” She nodded at the heater unit. “When you’re done with that, come down the hall and see my latest painting. I’ll make you a cup of tea to warm up. Okay?”

Cribbage continued to gaze up at her. He was less prone to smiling than was Jessika Inkster. But he smiled now.

“Okay.”

««—»»

As he headed down the hallway toward her door, he saw one of the yellow banners thrashing in the air outside the window at the very end, like an angry yellow ghost.

He knocked at her door, hoping that no one else would see him waiting here, see into his transparent head with its simple and antiquated gears and pistons. He wants to mount her, the generally younger tenants here might scoff. Of course that was true. But having sex with Jessika could not begin to approach his ache to absorb her into his very being. He wanted to possess her, consume her, and utterly worship her. He was a fool, but no more than any groveling acolyte, he reckoned—and then she suddenly opened the grimy door, and it was like heaven’s own gate parting. “Hey!” his god chirped. He went in.

Her paintings, and those of her friends, hung everywhere. Actually, he had seen some of her work before, as she carried it through the halls, but he had never been inside her rooms before. He wouldn’t dream of telling her that he found her work to be childish. It was an expression of her childlike appeal, he tried to counter. But the kindergarten-bright colors hurt his eyes. He had to admit that he had seen much better work from some of the less friendly tenants.

She waved at her latest piece, still on its easel, with a flourish. It was a nude child, crudely rendered, little more than a stick figure itself, crouched over a pool in which its face was reflected as the sun. The child’s still wet flesh was a garish yellow. She explained, “This place just screams yellow, I guess.”

Cribbage angled his head toward her windows, which looked out on two more of those rippling banners. “What do those things mean, speaking of yellow? Are they just designs, or do they say something?”

“Hector Kahlo was the one who came up with the designs for the flags, then Maria and Amie actually made them. Hector said he saw every one of those designs in a dream, and he kept a pad by his bed so he could sketch them as soon as he woke up.”

“Hector. He was that kid…”

Jessika nodded sadly. “Yeah. Poor guy. I guess he had a bad relationship with his family and everything. He hung himself, right outside his window on the other side of the building. Thank God I didn’t see it. Poor, poor Hector.”

“Yeah,” Cribbage said inadequately. “Um…so what’s it called? Your painting?”

“Oh—On the Shore of Hali.”

“Where’s that?”

“No place…I guess. Maybe I heard it somewhere, but I just liked it.” Crinkled eyes. “You know, I’ve been thinking that I’d like to paint you some time. Your portrait, I mean, not your body.” His heart fluttered—was that a flirtation, or a message that she hadn’t meant to sound like she was flirting?

“Why?”

“Why? Well, you have sad eyes. A sad kind of face.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“For a painting it is. Yeah.” She seemed to take him in and nodded approvingly, as if he were her living portrait and she was pleased with the end result. “I just get a vibration from you. I’ve got to run with it. An artist has to go with her instincts, you know.”

“Of course.”

“So you’ll model for me?”

“Sure.” Could she hear the clunk of his swallow? “When?”

“Um—right now?” As if to coax him—though of course it wasn’t necessary—she smiled.

««—»»

At first, she had him sitting on a stool as he watched the VT across the room so as to remain focused. But after an hour of this, Jessika seemed displeased with the result, or at least gripped with an intense new inspiration—he couldn’t be sure because only the back of the canvas was in his view. In any event, she had him stand instead, and from another room brought a blanket. She then draped it around him as she had worn this same blanket herself, earlier. It was soft and pastel blue and he drank in the warm scent of her from it…but after only a few minutes, her brow knitted in an expression he had never seen in her face before, she snatched the blanket off him and disappeared with it. Several moments later she returned with a yellow blanket, and robed him in this instead. This seemed to work, for she poured herself back into her painting with fresh vigor. Peripherally he watched the ferocious slashing of her arm as she lathered the canvas.

“What’s it going to be called?” he ventured out of the corner of his mouth, seeing as how she seemed to have settled on a particular vision.

“Shh,” she said. “I don’t know.” But a few beats later she stated, “Priest of the Imperial Dynasty.”

It meant nothing to him, so he tried to remain silent and priestly for her.

Nearly another hour passed, and then she called for a break. Rubbing his neck, he looked directly at her again, saw that a few speckles of red paint had been flicked across her white blouse, across the swell of her chest, from the bristles of her brush. He took a half step forward, hesitantly asked, “Can I see it?”

She seemed to hesitate herself, as if reluctant, but finally said, “All right…but it’s not done, of course.”

“If you rather I didn’t…”

“Well, I think maybe I’d rather you didn’t. Not just yet.”

“All right—no problem.”

She set down her brush. “Come on in the kitchen—I promised you tea.”

They sat at her diminutive table, and her mood slowly changed; her lowered brows unknotted and her intense pout became a smile again. She asked him about himself…where he was from, about his family. He shyly ventured the same. She laughed, got him to laugh. She made another pot of tea.

A knock at her door and Jessika let in two artist friends, a female and a male. Cribbage rose from the table as if caught in a lewd act. Jessika introduced them as Maria and Ben, and he was pleasantly greeted, but their eyes were drawn more to the canvas than to him.

“What is this, then?” the young woman asked. “This isn’t like anything you’ve done before.”

“Who is it?” asked the young man.

Cribbage didn’t approach the thing, respecting his earlier promise to wait. But it obviously didn’t resemble him, yet. He expected Jessika to tell them—to say, “It’s Ed.” But instead she said, in a dreamy perplexed voice, “I don’t know.”

He decided it was time to leave her with her friends. She would no doubt prefer their company. Perhaps the young man’s, especially; Cribbage couldn’t bear to look at him any longer. He wanted to tell Jessika to let him know when he was needed for another session, but couldn’t do so in front of the others. Instead, he thanked her for the tea and excused himself. She walked him past the easel to the door and put a small hand on his arm.

“Thanks, Ed,” she said quietly.

“If you need me again,” he whispered.

“I don’t think I will. I can finish it without you.”

“Oh, well…”

“But I’d like you to come see me again, okay?”

“Okay,” he replied—praying to his new god that she meant it.

««—»»

Edwin Cribbage clung to an overhead strap, his bag of tools resting by his feet. Like so many men—and women—in Punktown, he wore a gun beneath his winter coat. His was a Fucile 3.5, legally licensed, though of course that was not usually the case. He was aware of everyone around him on the hovertrain as it smoothly sped above its repulsor tracks; a Tikkihotto man gazed out a tinted window, his ocular tendrils swimming in the air as if they felt at the particles of light which made up his sight. A middle-aged black woman sobbed quietly in her seat. Four tough-looking boys with implants that stretched and tented their faces into hideous, threatening shapes leered at the other passengers, imitating the Tikkihotto with fingers waving in front of their eye sockets, imitating the sobbing of the black woman, finally turning their pointless hatred toward Cribbage to see what was ripe for mockery there. Cribbage nearly lowered his eyes, but instead glared back at them defiantly. The boys began to smile, to summon up their poisonous wit, but instead turned their eyes elsewhere, their smiles faltering. Cribbage was rather surprised. Had they caught a glimpse of his gun, holstered under his cloned-leather jacket? He glanced under his arm. No. He imagined it was something in his eyes, then. Not sad now, he imagined. Grim, determined, perhaps—after all, he had been summoned on a grave errand.

Less than a half hour ago, he had received a call at home. When his vidscreen came on, he saw the face of his employer, Mr. Ythill, gazing into his apartment.

Ythill had a not unattractive face which might have passed for human, as Jessika Inkster had discussed only several days earlier, but for its unnatural paper-white pallor. Also, even when he spoke, his features remained all but immobile, as if he were afraid to crack a layer of paint on his skin. Or as if his face were a mask.

“Hello, Edwin. I’m afraid I must send you to the Collaborative straight away. The authorities have already been notified, and will be expecting your help, whatever that might be.”

“What happened?” he asked the man, who must at this moment be on his far world of Carcosa, Cribbage thought, pending the trip here with some companions a little more than a week from now.

“Another suicide, I’m afraid—a woman named Maria Ang. Unfortunately these artistic types seem prone to harmful dramatics.”

Maria Ang. Cribbage remembered her—Jessika’s friend, to whom he had been introduced only a few days ago. A pretty girl with brown skin and slanted eyes and a boyishly short haircut. She had been one of the three artists, he also recalled, who had created the Collaborative’s banners.

“I’ll get right there,” Cribbage said distractedly.

“There’s a good man. And I’ll be seeing you on the eighteenth.”

“Yes sir,” he replied, and watched the pale mask dissolve.

Now, he saw his stop gliding toward him, the huge white letters on the station building that announced FORGE PARK.

As he walked toward the great row of mostly derelict factories, a wind as sharp as the blue winter sky slashed across his face, rippling his short dark hair. He leaned his slender frame into it. Under that stark cold dome which hid its burden of stars, he felt tiny, vulnerable. The one yellow star did not warm him.

The Collaborative was ahead—its banners cracking like whips. He remembered Mr. Ythill’s mocking words regarding the artists. Did he think they were all fools, then? Pathetic? If so, what inspired him to work with the government on the Collaborative? Surely there were more profitable ventures in Punktown. Wasn’t he the art lover, the patron of the arts, Cribbage had always taken him to be?

He thought also of Jessika. He had been waiting for a call, but one hadn’t come. He had hoped to see her in the hallways, and had found some reason to visit the fifth floor every day, but he hadn’t seen her. He had even once poised outside her door, and imagined he smelled her paints behind it. But he hadn’t wanted to disturb her, and hadn’t knocked.

There were indeed enforcer vehicles, and a medevac craft had lighted in the front lot. When he reached the door he asked a uniformed man to direct him to the detectives in charge of the investigation. He then proceeded to the third floor.

The door to Maria Ang’s flat was open, and another uniform outside it let him pass. As he entered, he immediately caught sight of the girl.

She sat propped up before one of the front windows, as if to gaze out at the city. Had he bothered to look up at her window from outside, Cribbage might have seen her face at the pane. Since he had last seen her, she had changed her appearance in three ways: she had shaven her head bald, painted a strange symbol on her forehead in yellow pigment, and choked herself to death by shoving both her fists, impossibly, into her mouth and halfway down her throat. Her jaw had come unhinged like that of a snake to accomplish this feat. Her face was nearly black, her eyes ballooned in their sockets, spittle and vomit dried on her chin and shirt front. How she had killed herself in this way was almost a secondary consideration—Cribbage couldn’t imagine how she had remained seated in her chair in front of the window throughout the spasms that surely must have wracked her body as it resisted such treatment.

“I’m Detective Amart,” a stocky, rumpled Choom husked, his ear-to-ear mouth down-turned in a vast scowl. Had Maria Ang been a Choom, native to this world, her feat might not seem so remarkable. “We’ve already notified the cleaning service you people used last time; Mr. Ythill asked us to give them a beep.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Cribbage asked blankly, unable to take his eyes from the dead woman for long. He had the strange impression that she was a—composition. A final, desperate artwork she had devised.

“You can work with the cleaning crew if they need it. We’ve just finished recording and going over the scene and we’re ready to remove the body.”

“Oh my God, Maria, oh God!” Cribbage heard a woman cry out behind him.

He whirled to see the uniformed enforcer in the doorway struggling to restrain a small woman with long brown hair. Cribbage rushed to her, and guided her out of the enforcer’s hands, into the hallway. There, to his surprise—and to his ashamed gratification—she fell into his awkward embrace, and sobbed against his chest.

Forsaking whatever meager duties might be required of him, he walked Jessika upstairs, to her own apartment.

««—»»

He made Jessika sit on her sofa while he fixed her some tea, and it wasn’t until he had handed her the cup that he realized the painting he had modeled for was covered by a tarp to hide it, as if she had expected his company.

“I don’t understand it,” the young artist said more to herself than to him, her voice a fragmented gasp. “People who do that—they show some signs first, don’t they? You can see it in their mood, don’t you think? But just like Hector…out of the blue.” She threw up her hand and let it drop back to her thigh in a frustrated slap. “She was working on a new series of quilts…the first one was so amazing. She was so excited. She wanted to do three of them. It was her best work…it was all she talked about. Summoning the King, she was going to call them.”

“Was there anything in that, in her art, that might give you a hint about where her mind was at?”

“No, I wouldn’t think so. It was gold stars and a great golden…I don’t know, bird or spirit or something…against a blue background. Unless that meant heaven to her, and she wanted to…oh, it just doesn’t make any sense, Ed! How can a person do something like that?”

“She worked on those flags with that Hector kid. Does that connection make any sense to you?”

“I don’t see why it would. But if it did, I should keep my eye on Amie—she was the third one who worked on them.”

“I don’t know if you saw it, but there was a funny symbol painted on Maria’s head. It was the same design embroidered on one of the flags.”

Jessika stared up at him. “That’s strange—but I don’t know what they mean. Like I said, Hector saw those designs in his dreams. Even he didn’t seem to give them any meaning.”

Cribbage nodded thoughtfully.

When Jessika had dozed off on her sofa, and he had covered her with her blue blanket, Cribbage rose from the chair he had settled in and stole to her computer, which she had left running. As he got into the net, he glanced guiltily over his shoulder, saw a troubled look on Jessika’s face that reminded him of her expression while she had worked on his portrait. Had she been dreaming while she painted, or was she now painting in her dreams?

On a scrap of paper he drew a crude version of the design as he remembered it from Maria’s forehead. He then placed it in Jessika’s scanner. After fumbling a bit, he scanned the image, and then asked the computer to identify it.

Several minutes passed, and he had given up hope when at last a screen came up which showed a much cleaner rendition of the symbol, and the caption:

“‘The Yellow Sign.’ A symbol worn by Carcosians (Aldebaran System) by which members of the Imperial Dynasty recognize one another. Also, some vague use in Carcosian folklore.”

The Imperial Dynasty. Hadn’t Jessika dubbed her portrait of him Priest of the Imperial Dynasty? Was she familiar with Carcosa’s culture?

Carcosa. Mr. Ythill was Carcosian.

Cribbage didn’t know how long it was proper to remain as a guest in Jessika’s apartment while she slept. Her watched her chest rise and fall like gentle waves beneath the blue blanket. At last he departed, but first he left a message on her monitor which read, “If you need me, beep,” and gave the number of his pocket phone.

He found the trauma clean-up crew finishing up in Maria Ang’s flat. They had been quick. “Not much to clean,” one woman cheerily announced. “No blood.”

They left him alone, and in no time he found the quilt that Jessika had alluded to.

Not a bird, he decided. More like a wraith, in gold thread. And upon its insubstantial head were spikes as if it wore a crown.

««—»»

When Jessika Inkster did not call him for two days, Edwin Cribbage called her. When she did not answer his calls, he took the train from his Punktown neighborhood to Forge Park.

Today the sky was a luminous gray like the inside of a great sea shell, and snow had begun to drift like volcanic ash. Cribbage hunched his neck between his shoulders and quickened his stride toward the yellow factory.

In the foyer he found an apparently drugged or drunken young woman with a henna-tattooed face sitting in a ratty armchair and muttering to herself between sobs. Her tears had blurred the black ink on her face somewhat. Cribbage threw her only a glance as he made his way to the elevator. It wasn’t working again; something else to fix. If his boss would let him. He took the stairs two at a time instead. His heart seemed to charge up the stairs even quicker, leaving him in its wake.

Fifth floor. Gloomy carpeted corridor. And when he reached Jessika’s door and put his hand to it, it creaked slightly open. He thrust it open the rest of the way.

Jessika stood before her painting, with her back to him. She was nude. The painting was unveiled.

The contrast between that desirable flesh and the menacing painted form made a blank of Cribbage’s mind; he faltered for several beats before moving deeper into the gray light of the room.

“Jessika,” he said, taking his eyes from the painting and placing a hand on her bare shoulder.

At his touch, she toppled stiffly backward and thudded to the floor, her slender frame seemingly as heavy as carven marble.

Her fingers, extended to the air as claws, were caked in dried paint. No, of course not paint. And from her empty eye sockets, more of that dark fluid had run down her cheeks, down her graceful sweeping neck, around and between her once soft breasts, which now glowed pallid and cold as alabaster.

“Oh God…oh,” Cribbage sobbed in a whisper. “Jessika…oh my God…”

He wheeled about, as if accusingly, to confront the portrait again. The face and figure that had started out as his own, before further inspiration had gripped the artist.

The portrait—far more realistic and accomplished than Jessika had seemed capable of—was of a man in robes of shimmering yellow silk, torn and ripped in places. A clasp that held the robe closed bore the symbol he had seen on Maria’s head, and on the flag. The Yellow Sign.

The face still resembled his own, in general form, but the eyes were not sad. They seemed cruelly wise, almost amused. And the skin was more white than even that of a corpse drained of its blood. Smooth as a mask.

It was her masterpiece.

Cribbage lowered himself to a crouch beside the young woman, and rested a hand gingerly on her chilly forearm as he wept soundlessly over her. But only moments later, he shot to his feet abruptly.

He opened her windows. Drew in the two banners he could reach. One of them bore the Yellow Sign. In the hall, he opened the window at its end to gather in that banner as well.

Minutes later, he had the bundled flags under one arm and his portrait hoisted in the other. It banged the stairs as he took it down into his basement workshop—where he slashed the canvas and shattered its framework before feeding the remnants and the bundled flags into the trash zapper to be broken down to their barest, poisoned atoms.

««—»»

FORGE PARK, the huge white letters read on the flank of the low structure. Edwin Cribbage smirked at it, as he huddled within his cloned-leather jacket against the bitter sting of a fresh blizzard. It had always seemed such a yin and yang name to him. Like Work/Play. Life/Death.

The train whispered into dock; the sift of falling snow was louder. Through its billowing veils, the disembarking passengers looked mistily like a boat-load of souls freshly delivered to the underworld. Cribbage started forward. It was the eighteenth.

Through the winding sheets of snow he saw the glow of three figures in yellow robes.

The foremost figure stepped toward him as well. It was Mr. Ythill.

“Well, Edwin—this is a surprise.”

“So I’d imagine,” Cribbage said, withdrawing the Fucile 3.5 from inside his jacket, extending it, and shooting his boss three times in his bone-white face. Even before he had crumpled in a pool of yellow robes, Cribbage swivelled his gun to point at one of the other figures. As he went down the third spun to bolt, so Cribbage shot him three times in the back of the head.

Other passengers scattered or dropped to the ground, screaming and shouting. Cribbage ignored them as he moved amongst his three victims. One briefly twitched. Only Ythill lay on his back, his face turned to the falling snow. The skin around the entry wounds was cracked like porcelain, while from the holes ran a fluid as thick as sap and the color of bananas. It had the stench of a corpse long liquefied inside a walking sarcophagus.

Numb, Cribbage lowered his gun to his side. Snow collected on his lashes as he regarded his handiwork.

He thought that he would title this piece: The King, Banished.

The Dance of Ugghiutu

- ONE -

When my lover Aneet died on stage just before the climax of The Dance of Ugghiutu, I assumed she’d been murdered. After all, just before the dance had come to its conclusion, a man from the planet called Kali had stood up in the audience and emptied the full clip of a Wolff .45 at the stage.

I found out later that some of the audience thought it was part of the bizarre performance. Not me; I’d seen Aneet rehearse, she had discussed the dance with me enthusiastically. As unusual and even unsettling as the dance was, it was dignified, beautiful, would never have included the crass theatrical gimmickry of a blank-firing actor planted in the audience. And The Dance of Ugghiutu predated the introduction of firearms to Kali, so when the assassin bolted up from his seat and began firing, I had no illusions. I did not actually see him in the process of rising, I should clarify—first I heard the explosive blasts. The gun had no discreet silencing feature. When the thunder struck, I saw one dancer, Shalee, stumble out of her mad dervish-like spinning, her arms flailing for balance as she crashed into Aneet and knocked her down. When Shalee sought to regain her feet, coughing out a spray of blood, more projectiles pounded her back to the floor. Where moments before she had been whirling like a top, seeming to glide just above the polished stage surface, now she only gave limp jerks as her sprawled figure was punctured and penetrated by bodies faster even than hers had been.

A fine red mist floated up from her to settle again like fog dew. With the lights still beaming on her, I suppose it was beautiful in its horrible way. The frenzied music kept playing, undeterred, determined to reach its fulfillment. Stay down, I screamed at Aneet in my mind, unable to scream above the roar of the gun. There were two dancers left—Rakala and Mahreen—and they had come out of their spinning more gracefully, keeping their balance. They both made a run to the left. It was unfortunate. Perhaps if one had gone to the right, the assassin might have become confused, and one of them might have escaped before his clip ran dry. As it was, he had only to point his weapon at their combined fleeing forms and strike both of them quite easily. Some of their wounds were caused by the same projectiles.

Rakala, miraculously, would be the sole survivor of the four Kalian performers—though, struck in the chest and both of her graceful dancer’s legs, she very nearly died. It was assumed that the trauma of her severe wounds and the loss of her friends were what drove the young dancer to a mental breakdown.

I no longer believe that to have been the cause of her insanity.

The man pointing the gun from the fourth row was seized by others around him as they finally realized the truth of the situation. His last few shots went wild as a result, tearing into the stage backdrop, which was a depthless-looking black with a stylized Kalian temple painted against it in metallic gold paint. I had painted that temple on the backdrop myself.

I tore through the bodies separating me from the stage. Aneet…my Aneet. She had not risen. Only Rakala moved, writhing. Only Rakala wailed, nearly drowning out the recorded music, which then ended and left only screams instead of applause.

The women had been wearing traditional Kalian garments; gauzy white dresses that ended just above their bare feet, which on Rakala and my Aneet were tattooed with an intricate design like black lace against their ash-gray Kalian skin. They all four wore tight white blouses with long sleeves, which buttoned up to their throats, showing no cleavage, but which left their midriffs bare down to the low-slung skirts. Most Kalian men prefer their women a bit on the voluptuous, meaty side, and they naturally tend toward this. Mahreen and Shalee had full hips and sensual rounded bellies. But Aneet was very short, very slim, and Rakala was almost too thin, flat-chested, though her thighs were muscular. The white costumes made the blood seem to blaze molten. As I said, they wore traditional garments—but traditional to an older Kali, and only worn by a select sect of dancers who would perform only for priests, politicians, men of wealth and power—never the common rabble. A modern Kalian woman would never wear clothing that bared her belly. She would not wear the archaic foot tattoos, deemed too sexy now, and even in their day not meant for the eyes of the general public.

Most of all, according to the powerful dictates of their religion, these women should have their black hair covered by blue turbans, as a woman’s hair was an even greater temptation than her sexy naked feet. But all four blasphemously went without this covering. Rakala and Shalee had long hair, down to their waists, thick and straight, nearly blue it was so black. Sexy as it was, at least it was the acceptable style for young women. But Aneet had her hair cut to just below her jaw line, a smart, sophisticated look that was very much against tradition. Mahreen had gone a step further: she kept her head shaved completely bald. In her obsolete traditional garb that she wasn’t qualified to be wearing, mixed with her untraditional shorn head, Mahreen alone had symbolized all that the orthodox Kalian could not tolerate. When not ignoring the customs of her culture, women like Mahreen seemed to be embracing them only to mock them. On Kali, and even on other worlds like this planet Oasis, even in this modern day, a Kalian woman was not permitted to speak outside her home. Some were not even permitted to do so there.

So when I realized what was happening, and that it was a blue-turbaned Kalian man who was doing the shooting, I did not wonder why this was taking place. In fact, I had long been fearing that Aneet might one day be attacked again by a fanatical member of her own race. She had been attacked once before. As I clambered up onto the stage, calling her name, I could see her face—and the results of the earlier attack I mention.

Aneet was achingly beautiful. Kalians have that smooth gray flesh, and their eyes are entirely black, as though globes of obsidian have been set in their sockets. There is a slight oriental aspect to the eyelids of many of them, though in Aneet it wasn’t pronounced. Her nose was proud and pointed, her mouth small but with very full lips. Even as she lay there spattered with blood, her mouth was closed and composed, almost in a haughty pout. Every Kalian woman, to my eyes, is an exotic princess. But Aneet’s beauty had been marred in two ways.

On her forehead and cheeks were the raised keloids brought about by ritual scarring and dubbed the Veins of Ugghiutu. Ugghiutu is their demon/god who both creates and destroys all life. Every Kalian woman receives the scarring upon puberty. These marks brand all who wear them as the daughters, and yet also the brides, of Ugghiutu. The men wear no such scars.

But Aneet had been scarred in yet another way. While she had been a freshman in college, seemingly safe from the constricts of her home world, seemingly liberated on the campus of Paxton University here in the city we prefer to call Punktown, a city colonized primarily by Earthers like myself, Aneet had been approached by a male Kalian who was also a student at P. U.. From the science department he had secured a vial of acid, which he threw in Aneet’s face there in a green-lawned courtyard between the buildings in which students were taught to think in modern ways but to respect the diversity of all cultures. Unfortunately, this male Kalian had been disrespectful of his fellow Kalian’s refusal to wear a turban, her outfit of t-shirt and tight blue denim pants, the very fact that she was attending university at all. Perhaps he had even known that she was a lesbian, though this incident occurred before she met me.

The young man was expelled and insufficiently punished. Aneet was left with rough scars across her forehead and around her left eye. Fortunately, she had squinted her eyes shut and jerked her head away from his throw. Fortunately he had had only a small portion of a comparatively weak acid.

I saw the scars on Aneet’s serene face as I bent over her now. As I shook her. As I sobbed her name. She could have had them removed, her skin made smooth again, quite easily. She had opted not to. For the same reason she had not had the Veins of Ugghiutu removed. It was yet another act of defiance. A scarlet letter worn proudly, though I had to explain to her what I meant by putting it that way.

I touched her scarred cheek now, my fingers trembling. I knew she was dead. I knew she’d been shot.

But I would learn things after that horrible night.

I would come to realize that it wasn’t the shooting that had driven Rakala mad. It wasn’t simply the rebelliousness of the dancers, performing an ancient dance which was not meant for unprivileged eyes, that had incited the Kalian male to violent frenzy. And, I would learn after Aneet’s body had been taken away by the police, she had not died by gunfire.

Despite the blood from her friends, there wasn’t a mark on her.

- TWO -

Aneet and I met at the Forge Park Artists’ Collaborative, where we had both been able to rent apartments—she as a dancer, me as an aspiring theatrical stage designer. She had just graduated from P.U., I was in my last year. I’d seen her around the campus, where I had taken note of her because there were only a handful of Kalian women enrolled, but we had never drawn close enough to talk.

The Artists’ Collaborative was a group of apartments and/or studios funded by art grants, in what had once been a factory in the old industrial sector called Forge Park. Nearly all the plants and warehouses in this sector were abandoned by now, either boarded up or being bought for other uses. Some of the plants had burned down through arson, and homeless people and mutants squatted in others; a number of the FPAC tenants had been mugged, and there had been a rape, but we were careful, tried to venture out in groups, and we felt it was a wonderful place. A world unto itself, a microcosm within the harsh macrocosm of Punktown. A real home and community. We fostered each other’s creative juices, until the whole building was suffused with that energy, like a power source just waiting to be tapped.

In a derelict warehouse toward the far end of Forge Park, just at the edge of the train yard, some of us had staged a number of plays and concerts. We didn’t know who owned the warehouse, and there were those in the Collaborative who frowned upon our trespassing, afraid that if we were found out we might all be evicted. The ceiling dripped when it rained, and more than once I’d had to repair water-damaged stage settings. Sometimes a mere half dozen people showed up for a performance; I was disappointed at the turn-out after all the work I did on the painted backdrop and melted props for a piano concerto written and performed by one of our residents, called Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano, after a Dali painting. But other times we had a good turn-out, and some performances had even been reviewed in trendy art magazines. I for one favored the illicit use of the warehouse. The Collaborative was government funded, but what young artistic type wants to be a well-behaved pet of those on high?

I was in the sweaty, cursing, bitter process of dismantling the stage dressing for Atmospheric Skull, in fact, when Aneet approached the stage and first spoke with me. First spoke of her idea to perform The Dance of Ugghiutu.

She put me in a much better mood straight away. Well, after a few moments of wariness. She had that pouty sensual mouth, so serious, that even when she smiled rarely showed teeth, just curved a bit into a pleasant sneer. A leftover, despite her rebellion, of the reserve Kalian women are programmed with. She introduced herself, and I moved a giant plastic tooth (from the immense skull I’d built) from my right arm to my left so as to shake her hand. She told me she’d seen my work, and asked if I would be willing to render the stage settings for a dance performance she intended to put on with three Kalian friends who were not residents of the Collaborative.

I was intrigued and flattered, but my enthusiasm only grew when I realized that Aneet liked women. I could feel it even before we left the warehouse together and hopped a train to a nice café off Oval Square, not far from P.U.. Maybe it was a telepathic vibration, or the release of pheromones, or the way she looked at me…or maybe she was responding to the way I looked at her. I found myself patting away the dust on my pants, pushing the hair out of my face like a nervous girl on her first date. Well, it was that, wasn’t it?

When we—soon—became lovers, Aneet would rave, with that fervent appreciation of the artist, over my own appearance. I am as short as Aneet was, with a little girl look that has got me called cute to the point of nausea, my face round with baby fat and my hair naturally blond (though I’ve been known to extra-blond it). Aneet found this as rare and exotic a feature as I did her gray skin and onyx eyes. We were two nicely fitted halves of a yin and yang. Aneet so solemn, composed, and me who is smiling in every picture ever taken of me, all goofy cuteness and squinty eyes. That was how I was then, in any case.

I’m a bit on the meaty side. Aneet liked that. She liked to knead my soft upper arms. A fetish with her, like her lace-tattooed feet were to me. I liked to suck her toes. She loved my breasts, which are big enough to prove I’m not really a little girl, and she could suckle at them for hours, during which times I thought she might even be dreaming, and she would make this barely audible humming sound of contentment. She also made it when she nuzzled my belly. Or between my legs.

But first it was coffee. Discussions about her dance. She had won me over to the project instantly. Just for the chance to be near her. To smell the sweat of her hard work. To see her rehearse in leotards and tights, usually black, that made her body all the more feline; in too-short t-shirts or sports bras when it was hot and muggy in the warehouse. It was a heady time. As the creative energies built up in the Collaborative, so did they flow and blend with an added vibration of passion in the warehouse.

When her three friends came into the picture, I was a bit resentful—I already wanted Aneet all to myself. But it was shortly after that that she first kissed me, as if she sensed my insecurity, as if to reassure me.

The four of them told me more and more about the play. I took notes. I did searches on Kalian architecture on the net so as to get a feel for the design. Aneet had envisioned a temple to Ugghiutu either being partially constructed, framing the stage, or painted as a backdrop.

She’d make fun of me when, in my Outback Colony accent, I tried to pronounce the names of Kalian countries, cities, temples, demons in service to the great demon/god Ugghiutu. This being or creature, I found in my research, was seldom artistically envisioned except very abstractly—as a black sun ringed in a corona of tentacles, with one red eye, I suppose it was, in the center…or as a whirling vortex, black, with a red spiral for infinity as its nucleus. He consumed the souls of the living, a sort of octopus grim reaper, but then pooped them out again as new souls, recycled and reincarnated. He was harsh, unforgiving, vengeful, cruel, monstrous—the usual godly attributes. And he apparently lived in a kind of spiderweb or latticework or scaffolding or whatever it was that held the universe and the dimensions together, or at least interconnected them. This unseen palace was the Temple or the Cathedral of Ugghiutu, and actual temples were built according to meticulous blueprints that were meant to emulate these cosmic patterns. So I, in turn, had to emulate these temples carefully if I wanted to represent one of them faithfully on stage (though I wasn’t too keen on the faith involved). I decided on the fairly stark, deceptively simple, dignified approach of the black backdrop with the gold-painted temple silhouetted there. I suggested that in the sky I could paint a gold sun with the whirling tentacles of Ugghiutu.

Shalee, Mahreen, Rakala and Aneet all looked at me in outright horror at this suggestion. Add Ugghiutu himself to the picture? No, that couldn’t be. For one, he was black…black…never gold, never light. And no woman could render an image of Ugghiutu. Only priests had ever done so, and they had then ritualistically hung themselves afterwards, because Ugghiutu had shown himself to their minds.

Here was Aneet—a lesbian in love with an Earth woman, without a hair-cloaking turban, attending college, staging an obsolete dance that only a unique guild of performers had ever been allowed to perform for an elite audience—gaping at me in horror like the most fervid of worshipers. I tried to tease her about it. She only became chilly toward me. I let it drop, bewildered. These women were diligently researching and reconstructing and resurrecting this mystical, rumored dance out of a kind of defiance, an act of contempt for the imprisonment of their sex—but at the same time, I sensed, out of a self-loathing half-conscious cultural pride. Almost as if they could not escape the programmed call to worship this god of theirs, to pay tribute to it.

Here they wouldn’t allow me to visualize Ugghiutu, and yet the purpose of the dance, Aneet explained, was to summon him (in spirit) before the gathered audience of the rich and powerful. Then, these elite would pay their own tribute to the god—by sacrificing the dancers, who had trained all along knowing that this was to be the fate of such an honored, devout few.

- THREE -

The production was months in the making. Aneet was able to find only two musicians—one a Tikkihotto, the other a Coleopteroid—to reconstruct the music for the dance. She had envisioned musicians performing live on traditional instruments, but the best she could manage was a recording synthesized by these two odd aliens…the Tikkihotto a humanoid except for his masses of wavering eye-tendrils, and the Coleopteroid nothing much more than a giant beetle walking upright on its lowest pair of legs. Once, Rakala took me aside and confided that some Tikkihottos and many Coleopteroids belonged to cults which worshiped, in secret, Ughhiutu and his brethren. She told me that even amongst Earth peoples, for thousands of years, these cosmic beings had been worshiped as deities.

I expressed some skepticism, and wondered just how well versed the Kalian was in Earthly religions, but she insisted. She likened Ugghiutu to an entity from obscure Earth lore called the Crawling Chaos, and another called Azathoth…suggested that Ugghiutu might even be one of them but with an alternative name, since these beings could vary their “aspect.” I had never heard of any such deities, but for some reason the sound of the name Azathoth sent a quick shiver down my arms, as if I were in fact aware of the name somehow but didn’t want to think about it.

She told me that certain rare and/or forbidden Kalian mystical texts got fairly detailed about Ugghiutu and his brothers—who were called the Outsiders, for dwelling in a kind of heaven or other plane apart from ours. Aneet had located two of these volumes; one she had downloaded off the net, and the other she had viewed in a rare bookdealer’s shop in Subtown, the subterranean sector of Punktown. It had been beyond her means to purchase it, but when the proprietor wasn’t looking she had photographed a few pages. These books had been especially helpful in reconstructing the dance. The dancers were advised to spin clockwise for so many minutes, counterclockwise for another specified period, and they must precisely trace certain patterns across the stage as they moved. Even the notes of the score—this having been reproduced in the book she had downloaded—had to be layered upon each other in mathematical precision.

Rakala went on to tell me how this downloaded book, which sounded more like a necromancer’s spell book than a Bible or Talmud or Koran, contained chants that could be recited and symbols that could be drawn to summon forth these Outsiders, or at least rouse them a bit from their sleep; apparently most of them were trapped in a kind of hibernation, or suspended animation, imposed on them by a similar race with whom they had been at war. Rakala explained that some Earth scholars of the esoteric had interpreted this battle as being a contest between good gods and evil gods, but she said that concept was too simplistic; that the battle between the Outsiders and the other mighty race was as inscrutable to us as a battle between a giant squid and a sperm whale. We might sympathize with the whale out of sentimentality, but the whale did not align itself with humanity.

She grew more enthusiastic, telling me things that I felt Aneet had been keeping from me. She said that there were equally rare books from Earth’s own ancient history that contained extremely similar summoning rituals, nearly identical geometric formulae. Even passages of verse from the downloaded Kalian book (called the Fizala) were uncannily similar to those in an Earth book called the Necronomicon. She gave an example by quoting from the Kalian book first. Being more proficient in English than Kalian, Aneet had had her computer translate the book into English whilst downloading it; hence, the passage Rakala recited rhymed in my own language:

Not extinguished, still smouldering

In ice the fire lies

Until the cycle turns to bring

Life to that which dies.

Then, the passage she quoted for comparison from this Necronomicon book went as follows:

That is not dead which can eternal lie.

And with strange eons even death may die.

Well, I conceded, they both used “lie” and “die” to rhyme. But Rakala recited them again, insisting that they expressed the same sentiment, but the sentiment was a bit abstract for me to begin with. I pointed out that the Kalian quote seemed simply to refer to the changing of the seasons, the eternal cycle of life, death and rebirth that Ugghiutu symbolized. Rakala persisted in the idea that this sort of thing, written on two vastly separated worlds long before space travel, showed that there was a cosmic collective unconscious that linked human minds with the Outsiders. Something to do with the connective webs of force in which they dwelt like spiders (sounded like the computer net, to me). I told her you couldn’t trust the accuracy of work translated into English from another language, especially when the translation is bent into rhyme. Rakala argued that Aneet’s computer did not refer itself to the Necronomicon passage in order to shape the Kalian passage into a similar rhyme. Well, I argued back, there is such a thing as pure coincidence. Let a million monkeys type for a million years and they’d eventually produce the Necronomicon, I joked.

Yes, Rakala joked back, but then the monkeys would have to ritualistically hang themselves afterwards.

- FOUR -

There was a bit of excitement and distraction during our preparations, when one night we were descended upon by big firefighting robots and a couple of enforcers, shrieking like an army of banshees into Forge Park. We realized that one of the warehouses had been torched. (For a few moments I was afraid it was our makeshift theater, until I looked out a window in my fourth-floor apartment and saw the flames burning in another direction.) The arsonists, it turned out, were a small gang of homeless mutants who did not flee the scene of the crime, but ringed the building and held makeshift weapons like spears and crude axes. We heard later, after one of the enforcers had confided to one of our pretty resident actresses, that the mutants claimed to have trapped some kind of a monster inside the building, and gruffly admitted to being the arsonists who had set the blaze. They had guarded the doors and windows on the ground floor to keep this monster from escaping.

I joked to Aneet that maybe some of the horrible wailing we had heard hadn’t been sirens, but the cries of this monster trapped in the flames. She only gave me a chilly look, like she did when I pressed her to show me this Fizala book she had downloaded, or the photos she had taken of pages from the other (whose title she wouldn’t even speak).

I never heard anything about the remains of a “monster” being found in the gutted warehouse. Not even the body of an especially mutated squatter who might have been considered a monster. What the enforcer said the vagrants had described was some kind of huge jellyfish, dragging itself along the ground with long white tendrils. The entire featureless body was clear and at first some of them thought it was some kind of plastic wrapping or a downed balloon, blowing across the warehouse floor. But it had made agitated whistling sounds, they claimed, and lashed its arms at them. They had chanced upon it inside the very warehouse they camped out in. The mutants had destroyed their own refuge, and gained the refuge of prison, in their obsession to kill this thing.

That’s what low-quality drugs will do to you, some of my friends joked, dismissing their claims.

My backdrop was coming along very nicely, thanks to Aneet’s sometimes irritating fanatical guidance, and rehearsals had become more elaborate. But Aneet insisted that the dance must never be rehearsed in its complete form. It was a symbolic summoning of the Kalian god, and if they were to take this thing seriously, one could not summon the essence of this god every time there was a rehearsal. This was how the traditional clan of dancers had approached their art. They would rehearse in segments to the music, or they might go through the entire dance but with the music left out.

One of the instruments the Tikkihotto synthesized for the musical piece was a kind of flute or pipe that built to a feverish pitch. I began to dream about this section of the music, as if it became a score for nightmares whose images I could not usually recall. But in one dream I distinctly remember that I walked up to my gold-painted temple against its void-like black backdrop. I was naked but my hands, when I looked at them, were stained in glittery gold paint. As I approached the temple, I finally detected in its arched windows, its various tapered towers, its ornate curves and lines, certain patterns that were both mathematical and cabalistic. I felt like I’d been tricked into rendering these symbols, camouflaged in the architecture of the building. As I strode even closer to the backdrop, the stylized two-dimensional gates swung open silently before me. Framed in the doorway was a rectangle of more blackness…but stars shimmered against it. Galaxies slowly spiraled. I drew closer still. I was going to walk through that doorway, into my own painting. Inside my body I wanted to scream, I clawed to get out of myself, but outwardly I didn’t falter—I walked blankly on like a robot or a zombie, programmed by some other force. And in the doorway, I saw a vast black silhouette blot out the whorls of stars. At the center of this darker blackness there was just a single galaxy that spiraled. A galaxy of nothing but red dwarf stars…forming an immense eye.

I woke up just before I stepped across the threshold. But for a moment or two after, as I lay staring at the ceiling with my heart galloping, I could swear I still heard that frenetic piping music fading off into the distance.

I wasn’t the only one with nightmares. Despite having her own apartment in the Collaborative, Aneet spent most nights with me. We realized this wasn’t fair, as apartments in the building were limited, so we had decided to let our landlords know that Aneet would be moving in with me permanently. In any case, one night I was awakened with a jolt by a cry of terror right beside me. I sat up to find Aneet already sitting up in bed, hugging her bare chest and staring into a corner of the small bedroom. I asked her what she’d been dreaming.

She told me she had seen something come out of the corner of the room. Something had emerged directly from the joining of the walls. A dimly glowing form. Something with a head like a jellyfish, she said, its rim rippling, streaming long tendrils that floated in slow motion. The fuzzily-defined body was vaguely skeletal, and seemed to have segmented pincered limbs like those of a crab standing on two legs. And from its back sprouted two membranous wings that also seemed to move in slow motion, as if the being were moving through water. Or, perhaps, space. Or even another dimension.

And Aneet swore that she hadn’t been dreaming, no matter how much I tried to convince her otherwise.

She muttered to herself, still staring wide-eyed into the corner. She asked herself why she was really putting this dance together; what was she doing? I asked her what she meant by this, but at last she only took her eyes from the corner, slipped back under the covers and held me very tightly. That night she wouldn’t let me shut the light back off.

It seemed to me her own research was beginning to frighten her, where in the beginning there had only been confidence, enthusiasm and defiance. I could only assume that something in the book she had downloaded was getting under her skin…and so one afternoon, with just a week to go before the dance performance, I took the unbound manuscript pages out of the bureau I was letting Aneet use until she could move in with me. Aneet and the others had gone out to post flyers advertising the dance throughout the city.

Later we would learn that one of our friends, an Earth girl like me, glued one of these flyers to a wall of the Um-Rakheer Temple in Subtown, below the city proper, where there was a fairly large Kalian community. Later she would tearfully claim that she honestly thought the Kalians might be interested in our performance, though I suspect she knew full well that they would disapprove of the dance, and pasted the flyer there on a humorous whim, to mock and tease them. It was a prank with tragic consequences.

I sat on the edge of the bed we shared with the manuscript spread across my lap. The pages of the Fizala were heavily annotated with notes Aneet had made in the margins, numerous passages having been highlighted as well. One of the longer of these highlighted passages caught my eye almost immediately. It read:

The Outsider may be summoned in essence, but never awakened from His dreams; He may be consulted, as even in His dreams can He yet converse with His acolytes, but fully roused He is beyond the need for even the most faithful of men, whom He will trod upon with the infidel alike. As men use insects to make honey, so does the Outsider make use of men, but as men do not love these insects, and will destroy them without grief, so will the Outsider crush even His highest priests if He has no further need of them. Asleep, He has need of our kind so that we might make all attempts to summon Him into our world. And summon Him briefly whilst in His dreams we shall. But even those most loyal of us must betray His desire, if we are to survive as men, and the world survive without the horror of His visitation upon it. It is for the wisest of our priests to keep this truth even from our common priests. Allow them to believe that they serve only the full intentions of our Master. But watch closely that these priests use only the summoning rituals that are assured not to end the Dreaming One’s timeless slumber.

Wow, I thought. I joked to myself that it was a good thing Ugghiutu had never read this book by his supposedly loyal followers, or he’d damn well wake himself up and crush them like insects anyway. So…they took advantage of the sleeping god, using his guidance and his power while he slept, pretending that they were ever trying to release him from his prison of hibernation, but all along having no intention of really doing so. Faithful followers who were ever unfaithful to their god.

I figured that The Dance of Ugghiutu, traditionally, must only have been intended to attract the god’s half-conscious dreaming mind, and hadn’t been meant to summon him to full wakefulness. If the dance were done incorrectly, though, might there be a risk of actually waking him entirely?

Listen to me, I thought. I was fretting like I believed in him, myself. I knew that extradimensional beings did in fact exist—the beetle-like Coleopteroids, for instance, came from another dimension. But they were not able to cross space and time at will like these Outsiders were supposed to have done, before their imprisonment. Every extradimensional race I knew of had to utilize technology so as to cross back and forth. The Coleopteroids used large train-like devices that rode along looping, overlapping tracks, tracing certain complex patterns again and again until they finally passed through into our plane. However amazing, it wasn’t any more magical than the traversal warpage and teleportation that enabled us to travel between planets within our own dimension.

I flipped through more of the Fizala, and saw various geometric formulae in addition to the text, and actual illustrations as well. In some, bizarre beings or animals were portrayed. One especially disturbing drawing showed a Kalian man clutching at his head in agony, while from his swollen and splitting skull some octopus or jellyfish seemed to be emerging. I wondered if this was a baby version of the thing Aneet had dreamed was coming through our wall. The caption indicated the thing was a Hound of Ugghiutu. Some kind of demon-like servitor of the sleeping god. Yes, I decided, this sort of thing was the source of her superstitious nightmare.

But despite my concern for her, I felt guilty paging through this book that Aneet had taken such pains to keep from me, and I replaced it in the bureau. If it was that important to me I could track it down and download it myself.

Well, I joked inwardly, now that I had peeked at the thing I should really ritually hang myself, shouldn’t I?

- FIVE -

A week later my lover was dead. My beautiful Aneet…

Backstage just before the stage lights came up, I had kissed her and wished her luck. She had turned to me with a very odd look in that normally composed and haughty Kalian face, scarred but so beautiful. Though her eyes were entirely black, black as the backdrop I’d created, I knew her well enough by now to discern an uncharacteristic fear in them. You have to understand—for a Kalian woman to be as bold, as rebellious as Aneet demonstrated her tremendous courage. So this strange look of fear—fear mixed with a kind of lost bewilderment—made me afraid in turn. There was almost a pleading look in her expression. As if she were silently asking me to explain what was happening to her. Or maybe, pleading with me to stop her before the music started. But I didn’t understand. And the music did start…and Aneet turned away from me and dutifully went to answer its call.

The assassin was disarmed and badly beaten by the time the enforcers arrived. He was screaming like a zealot even as they were dragging him from the warehouse. He was calling us fools. He was saying that he had saved all of us and we didn’t even know it.

I wouldn’t let Aneet go at first when they tried to take her from me. I was cradling her, sobbing against her neck. But they did take her away, and eventually I had nowhere left to go but back to my apartment. A few friends came with me, to comfort me. They watched silently as I took Aneet’s print-out of the Fizala out of the bureau and over to the trash zapper to destroy it. I raged aloud that a typically horrible, primitive, superstition-based religion was the cause of all this. Had created such hatred, fanaticism. But I couldn’t bring myself to zap the manuscript, not with Aneet’s careful notes abounding in the margins. I had to laugh, again staring at its frightening pictures and diagrams of necromancer’s circles. A mystical text that once would have been guarded like a Holy Grail or Shroud of Turin, nowadays downloadable from the net like the latest paint-by-numbers courtroom thriller. But it was still a cursed thing, wasn’t it, even in this form? Had Aneet never gotten her hands on it, she might never have reconstructed The Dance of Ugghiutu. It should be made unavailable. Become unobtainable again…just a rumored thing.

Two friends wanted to stay the night with me but I sent them away. I fell asleep on my little sofa wearing Aneet’s bathrobe over me like a blanket. It had the faint, spicy musk like patchouli or sandalwood that her skin naturally gave off.

The next day I learned that Aneet hadn’t been struck by any of the fanatic’s bullets. She had died of a cerebral aneurism, even as her friends were being hammered by bullets around her.

For some reason I didn’t fully understand at the time, I wanted to talk to this assassin, to meet with him in his cell, to confront him. I inquired into it but was turned down. His lawyers wouldn’t permit it. He was indeed, it turned out, a member of the Um-Rakheer Temple in the subterranean sector of Punktown. His lawyers were going to claim that he was a victim of temporary insanity brought about by the taunting presence of the flyer pasted on the wall of his place of worship, which could be construed as a hate crime which he in his devotion felt impelled to seek vengeance for.

I was, however, allowed to visit Rakala at the institution where she had been placed after she was treated for her serious wounds.

I waited for her in a large recreation room where most of the patients watched an animated movie on VT. A few sat at computers, a few just stared into space as if they watched things that I couldn’t see.

Rakala entered the room, operating her own wheelchair. She would eventually be able to walk again, I was told, perhaps even dance…but that depended on her mental state, and when I engaged her in conversation, I could see that that was where Rakala had been most catastrophically damaged.

She gripped my hand, her obsidian eyes wide in their sockets, and whispered that she had seen him. Just before the bullets struck her down, she had seen him. At first, I thought she meant the assassin. But she corrected me. It was the demon/god Ugghiutu she had seen. He had appeared to her in her mind. She had looked into his eye like the crater of a volcano, demanding her sacrifice to him, so that he might enter fully and at last into our world.

I tried to comfort her and to get through her delusions. But when she started to scream in Kalian and I tugged my arm free of her painful grasp, two orderlies had to rush over to sedate her. I was crying when they wheeled her away. The cartoon characters on VT mindlessly prattled on.

It was on the way back to the Collaborative that very night, stepping off the train at the Forge Park station, that I saw the mutant.

He was sitting on the platform, his back propped against the station’s wall, holding a huge and misshapen head in both hands as if to support its massive weight. Mutants are not unusual in Forge Park, as I’ve said, and they frequently haunt the station to beg money from commuters and to warm themselves at steaming grates in the winter. So I might not have given the poor creature a second thought if I hadn’t heard some of what he was muttering. Something about the pain in his head. At least I thought he said it was pain that was in his head.

But when I looked over my shoulder at him a second time, I thought I saw something wriggling between the fingers splayed across his bulging forehead. It was as though he held handfuls of white worms, and pressed them to his skull. It was as if he were trying to hold back some many-armed thing from emerging from his head.

I was swept along in a knot of bodies before I could look longer. But also, I didn’t want to look any longer.

And then one night, a Hound of Ugghiutu visited me in my dreams, just as it had Aneet.

I saw it as it began to draw its ghostly, luminous body from the corner of my bedroom. The tendrils that ringed its featureless head swayed and swirled like the hair of a drowned woman at the bottom of a lake. Its skeletal arms swam in slow motion, and its translucent wings beat slowly at its back. I knew then that the rehearsals and the nearly completed dance had been enough to summon these lesser spawn, if not the one they served.

I woke up crying out just as Aneet had, and for a moment when I sat up in bed I could still see a dim glow fading away in the corner.

I am an artist, as I’ve discussed. So in the morning, I painted symbols into that corner. Symbols that I copied from the Fizala. Protective signs. I painted them, ultimately, into every corner of the room. I didn’t care what my landlords would say when they eventually saw them.

I have never been religious. But I felt like a novice, now. I was a believer.

Despite its sentimental value, I ended up destroying Aneet’s copy of the Fizala anyway. I had already painted over the gold temple I had rendered against the black backdrop, hiding those secret symbolic patterns before dismantling the backdrop panels and feeding them into a dumpster-sized trash zapper.

I love Aneet still. I don’t know when I’ll find myself able to fall in love again. And so it’s agonizing for me to think that perhaps it was for the best that the assassin killed her friends after all. For the best that Aneet’s mysterious aneurism killed her, before she could complete The Dance of Ugghiutu.

Recently, Rakala committed suicide at the institution. Though I wept bitterly when I heard the news, I think that’s for the best, too.

I understand that she hung herself, ritualistically.

The Bones of the Old Ones

- 1 -

On the door to the apartment there was a symbol in red spray paint, crudely rendered and streaking, as if to further complicate interpretation of its meaning. It appeared to portray a star with an eye in its center, though the pupil—wavy and jagged—seemed to be a pillar of fire.

At first Bell had thought the paint was blood, but the smell of it was still fresh. Inside the apartment, however, the red streaking down the walls was not paint. He could tell that by the smell, too.

In the hall, a black-uniformed officer had stepped aside to admit him. Inside the apartment, there was a second uniformed forcer and a forensics field man. Bell nodded to them as they met his eyes. A man lying an his back on the living room floor met his eyes, also, but no cognizance showed in them. The man on the floor had been shot through the throat and the belly, his blood soaking into the ratty carpet and spattered on a bookshelf by his head.

“Three more,” said Graf, the forensic tech, shrugging in the direction of a narrow hallway. “One in the kitchen, two in a bedroom. All dead when we arrived.”

“No more children?” Bell asked him.

“Just the one down at the p. h..”

Bell nodded, and moved past Graf into the hallway. The kitchen opened directly off it, brightly lit and poorly cleaned. A cairn of dishes had been erected in the twin sinks, and the trash zapper was broken, as evidenced by a conventional wastebasket filled to overflowing. There were posters and pages torn from magazines taped or pinned to the walls in here, as there were in the parlor. Some were astronomical charts, others astrological. There were photos of archaeological sites and artifacts. On the aqua Choom-made fridge there were what seemed to be a child’s drawings held by magnets. They were involved designs, crude for having been rendered without benefit of a ruler, and yet obsessively geometrical. Some were like snowflakes greatly enlarged, others like technical blueprints, a strange mix of childishness and sophistication. They had all been drawn in a black marker. Had they been done by the little boy who was now being cared for at the precinct house?

Bell frowned at these imaginative designs, then down at the woman splayed grotesquely at his feet. She wore an oriental robe, imitation satin with a colorful dragon embroidered on the back. One of her well-worn slippers had come off and lay apart from her. It was a pathetic little detail of the sort Bell often noticed and focused on and wished he wouldn’t. Madness had entered amongst these mundane, everyday objects and personal possessions, subtly transforming them into sad, orphaned things. A crime scene to Bell was like a still life in which a skull had been set down in the midst of the flowers and fruit.

The woman’s lips were squashed open against the dirty floor and her face was half-enveloped in a caul of blood which had poured from the ragged entrance wound in her scalp. A door of skull had opened on a hinge of skin and much of her brain had been added to the mess already in the sinks.

Bell proceeded along the murky hall toward the bedrooms lightly, as if he expected the murderer of these people to suddenly spring at him from one of these doors…even though he knew that man was down at the precinct house right now, also, safely jailed behind a barrier of magnetic force.

The bathroom was empty if filthy. It stank of urine and wine-tinged vomit. At the end of the hall were two bedrooms facing each other. One was empty, the furnishings spare and the bed a mere mattress. There was a small mattress for a child fitted in a large closet with its louvered doors open. Nearing the closet, Bell poked his head in and saw more of those odd drawings taped to the walls. There were few toys. Under the mattress, Bell found a dagger. Had the boy hidden it away, meaning to use it to escape from these people, or had they given the weapon to him?

Well, this was Paxton after all, and far from being a town of peace, as its name might indicate, it was a place in which it might be wise to give your child his own weapon to keep by his bed. After all, Bell’s presence here was proof enough of that. Bell had no children of his own, and wouldn’t have raised one in Punktown—as its inhabitants had renamed the city—if he did.

In the other bedroom lay the last two bodies; a man shot through the hand and right eye and a woman shot through the jaw and neck. Both wore the perplexing vapid smiles of the dead. There was a second forensics tech in the room and she merely glanced up at Bell. His heart had flinched a little in his chest when he’d seen a living person in here. This was hardly Bell’s first homicide case, but there was an unsettling feel to the scene. It had more to do with the identity of the murderer, he thought, than anything else. His identity, and the mysteriousness of his motives.

Bell knelt by the man and lifted the sleeve of his white T- shirt a bit to better see a half exposed tattoo. It was a design done in metallic silver ink: a series of concentric circles, with rays radiating out from the center. A target? An eye?

When he stood, Graf was there beside him. Graf was a Choom, a native to this planet called Oasis, indistinguishable from humans save for the wide dolphin-like mouth which split his face from ear to ear. His heavy jaws were full of rows of molars evolved for the mastication of Oasis’s hardy roots, though right now he was chewing on the end of a pen. He talked around it as if it were a cigarette.

“You know this Kaddish guy, huh?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Bell.

“Why would he do this?”

“I don’t know.”

“There are weapons in the place,” Graf said. “Guns, knives, but Kaddish took them all by surprise so it wasn’t self-defense. He’s a hired investigator, John, but do you think he’d take on a hit for money?”

“No. I don’t believe he would.”

Graf shrugged, watched the tech as she worked over the female corpse, utilizing a small vidcam to record the body in full and the wounds in extreme close-up for the lab records and for courtroom use as needed. “These people weren’t too normal themselves. Looks like a kind of cult. There’s some sort of an altar in the living room; you should take a look.”

Bell grunted and followed the Choom back down the hall and into the parlor. In here, the vidtank which nearly took up one wall was filled with static as if it were a sandstorm raging in a giant aquarium. Its hissing was low in the background. The uniformed man turned to Bell. “We’ve IDed them all, sir. But for the kid; he doesn’t show in any station files, though he does bear a physical resemblance to this man here, and the woman in the kitchen.”

“Names?”

“This one, Willy Pugmire. His wife in the kitchen is Ingrid Hobbs-Pugmire. Both unemployed—laid off from Polyform Ceramix for two and a half years; on extended benefits. The two in the bedroom are Jesus da Favela and Wanda Macumba, both collecting welfare benefits. We cross-referenced them with the perpetrator and nothing linked up.”

“Thanks,” Bell murmured, brushing past the young officer, the altar Graf had mentioned having caught his eye.

A table had been made of a thick, oblong slab of gray stone resting atop two piles of ceramic foundation blocks stolen from some construction site. Various items needed for rituals were stored in the hollows of the blocks: candles, a lighter, a sheath of papers rolled in a tube. Bell withdrew this and opened the papers like a scroll. He grimaced. “What is this, another language translated into English?”

Graf peered over his shoulder. “Tikkihotto?”

“I don’t think so. We’ll have to run a scan on it.” He shoved the tube back into its slot, from another removed a clear vial containing a green powder which sparkled like pulverized emeralds. It was a trendy new drug nicknamed absinthe, popular with artistic types. He passed it to Graf. “Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.”

“Your friend Kaddish isn’t involved in drug running, dealing, like that, is he?”

“No. Drink. A lot of drink. But no chemicals.”

“Well, you don’t know. He’s obviously changed since last you knew him, John.”

Bell couldn’t argue with that. If Kaddish could become a ruthless mass murderer in three years, then why not an addict or a dealer?

He took in the altar table’s surface. A black candle had been positioned in each of the four corners of the slab, fixed in a pool of its own dried wax. There was a hollow at the center of the slab, and in it rested a curious decoration sculpted from black crystal marbled with blood red striations. It was an egg-sized gem cut into an odd-angled trapezohedron, though Bell wasn’t familiar with the mineral. He lifted it for closer inspection, and found himself narrowing his eyes as if he thought he might see into its darkness through his reflection on the polished surfaces. A shudder went through him unaccountably, and as he went to set the gem back into its hollow he saw that there was a shape outlined in the surface of the slab.

“Graf, is this a fossil?”

The Choom had been poking around inside more of the ceramic blocks, and straightened up to have a look. “Hm. Yeah. Looks like it. Well…it’s a spiral. Could be an old sculpture of some kind. Mm. No. No, that looks organic. A shell? Some giant shelled mollusk?”

“Did Oasis once have giant shelled mollusks?”

“No, but it doesn’t have to have come from Oasis.”

“Giant is right.” Bell pointed to the edges of the slab. The spiral kept on going, fading off the sides, as if the slab had been cut right out of the middle of it. How much farther would it have continued to extend out from the center, uninterrupted? And it was in that center, in what seemed to be a natural hollow, that the black polyhedron fitted. Bell set it back in place.

“Any idea what the focus of this cult might’ve been?” he asked the Choom.

“Never seen anything like it. The papers there will help us, once we decipher them. They didn’t own a computer but they have books; a bunch of weird occult dung, looks like. Some pseudo-Satanic thing?”

“Doesn’t look that simple.”

“Was Kaddish a religious nut? Maybe he felt he had to trash some infidels. His own little jihad.”

Bell was about to say that his old friend Joshua Kaddish was no religious fanatic, but stopped himself. Again, at this point he didn’t know what Josh Kaddish was capable of. He sighed, looked up at the wall mirror which hung directly above the altar. Once they took their absinthe and chanted their chants, with candle glow dramatically under-lighting their features, would the cultists then gaze into this mirror and imagine that their faces were transforming? Would they wait for spiritual visions to appear in their own reflected eyes?

Bell’s reflection showed a man of thirty-one, with sandy short hair neatly cut and brushed back from his forehead. His eyes were blue and far-spaced, his lips too full for his taste though his ex-wife had called them sensuous, back when she was inclined toward such a compliment. He thought himself homely; that his nose was too flat in profile, his teeth too small and his smile too wide. His wife had once called him handsome. There was to his face, oddly, both a boyish quality and a prematurely wasted, haggard aspect. He was slender but it was winter and his black, cloned-leather jacket gave him a little bulk. He thought he looked tired and unhappy. He expected to see no magic transformations, in that regard.

“What do you think happened to the rug over here, Graf?” called the forcer from across the room.

Graf and Bell joined him. The man was pointing to tears in the carpet extending from that corner out into the center of the room. It was as though a heavy bureau with spike-tipped legs had been dragged across the material, ripping it.

In the corner, at the point where the tears began, Kaddish had spray-painted another of those red symbols like the one he had sprayed on the apartment door. They knew he had painted these symbols, as opposed to the cultists themselves, because he had had the paint gun in his possession when apprehended, they’d heard. Bell wondered if Kaddish might indeed have become some sort of religious nut, of a kind violently opposed to the beliefs of this little group.

What about the corner had inspired Kaddish to paint the symbol there? And why did those tear-marks extend from the corner into the room? And why, finally, were there several bullet holes clearly punched into the plaster of the corner, as if Kaddish had made a target of the painted symbol? Bell fingered one of the holes absently. His eyes dropped to the tears in the soiled, food-stained carpet once more. Did those rows of tears extend from the corner out into the center of the room…or had they, instead, originated from the center of the room and then ended in the corner, at the red symbol? Either way, what had made the marks, and what had become of the thing that had made them?

“Can you turn off that damn vidtank?” Graf grumbled to the forcer.

The uniformed policeman reached out, punched some buttons to shut it off, accidentally changed channels instead. There was a brief glimpse of a broadcaster looking quite serious, and then the man hit the correct button and the tank was emptied.

“What was that?” Bell said. “Put it back on a second.”

The forcer obliged. The broadcaster materialized once more within the vidtank, practically life-sized.

“…absolutely no communications of any kind as of a half hour ago. All emergency communication frequencies have been opened, but as yet, no transmissions are being received from any source, commercial or government. Until the explanation for the communication black-out is investigated and rectified, all teleportation to or from Earth is to be officially put on hold…”

“Earth?” said Graf. “What happened?”

“Try another channel,” Bell said.

The forcer switched past a soap opera and a sitcom rerun, found another grim-looking newscaster.

“…the Emergency Lockout System. To repeat this urgent newsbreak: as of thirty-four minutes ago, all communication with Earth has been lost on every frequency and mode of contact, on all government, corporate and civilian bands. Whether the Earth has come under attack or suffered a natural calamity is not known at this time. Colonies as near as those on Earth’s moon also report full loss of contact with Earth, and are conducting probes and scans, with results forthcoming. We will let you know what is found out about this communication failure as soon as the information is relayed to us. Until the reason is understood and safe conditions are assured, no teleportations to or from the Earth are being permitted, all teleportation channels being blocked by the Emergency Lockout System…”

“Man,” breathed Bell to himself.

The forcer flipped through more stations. On a number of the many channels, there was only static. Programs from Earth, Bell realized, the transmissions now blocked. Or eradicated.

- 2 -

At his precinct station, Bell had to decide between interviewing the boy Kaddish had taken with him when he fled the apartment of his victims, or Kaddish himself. Perhaps wanting to delay confronting his old friend, Bell chose the boy.

“He’s six, our med scan says,” Bell was told by Irene, the officer who had been ordered to look after the boy until it could be decided what to do with him. “No medical problems, no signs of physical abuse from either the family he was with or from the perpetrator. He does have a tattoo, though, in the middle of his chest…”

“Silver ink. Circles inside circles, with rays coming out from the middle of it.”

“Right. You know what it means?”

“One of the victims had the same thing on his arm. Has he told you what happened?”

“No. He won’t talk. Hasn’t said a word. He must be terribly traumatized, but he smiles, at least. I gave him a sandwich and he ate a few bites.”

There was a bank of monitors near them, and Bell watched the boy on one of these. He looked calm enough, sitting there coloring with markers Irene had given him. His hair was so closely shorn that he looked bald, but no haircut or style was unusual in Punktown.

“So Kaddish was dropping the boy off outside Central Hospital…”

“Right,” said Irene. “He was letting the kid out of his car, outside the front doors. But he’d been followed by Ferrara and Woo, who responded to the reports of a vehicle fleeing from a gunfire scene. They pinned his car in with theirs and he took off on foot, but Woo brought him down with a dart. Kaddish had a gun on him but he made no attempt to fire on Ferrara and Woo at any time, luckily. He’s a very dangerous guy, so it’s funny. Unless he’s selectively dangerous. Must be, because he was obviously trying to leave the child in a safe place, even at risk to himself. Strange.”

“Yeah,” agreed Bell. “I think I’ll go try my luck with the boy.”

“Good luck.”

Irene let the detective into the room where the child was being kept, pending a search for surviving relatives and a psych appraisal from a Child Services worker on her way over.

When the door slid open, the boy looked up and crumpled the drawing he’d been working on into a tight ball in his fist. Bell smiled at him and chose to ignore this act for the moment, though he did take note of the color of the marker the child had selected to draw with from all those Irene had supplied him. Not black, as he would have guessed, but a metallic silver one. Irene left them alone together, and Bell seated himself opposite the boy.

“Hi there, pal. My name’s John. What’s yours?”

The child gave the detective a great big smile, the winning but unusual quality of which confirmed to Bell beyond any doubt that this was the same child who had drawn those obsessive geometrical designs. The boy replied, “Yog Sothoth.”

He had spoken readily enough. Maybe he trusted men more so than women. Encouraged, Bell repeated, “Yog? You’re Yog?”

The boy began to giggle wildly, rocked back on his rump. Bell tried on a smile but it didn’t fit well. Despite his concern for the boy’s welfare, he wasn’t in the mood for children’s games. And how could this boy be in the mood? Hadn’t he seen his parents slaughtered this afternoon, assuming the Pugmires were his family? Hadn’t he been kidnapped by their murderer? Had the experience shattered his uncomprehending mind?

“Is Yog your name, pal, or are you just kidding with me?”

“I am the gate,” the boy replied sweetly, rocking forward and back, hands on his knees. “Yog Sothoth is the key and the guardian of the gate.”

Bell’s smile was losing its hold on his skin. “What does that mean, buddy? Is that something your parents taught you? Were Willy and Ingrid your mom and dad?”

The boy stopped rocking but his smile, at least, didn’t falter. He said, “Ph-nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

“Uh-huh,” Bell said. He straightened up, thinking the boy was really taunting him now. Nonsensical jibber-jabber. Unless…he was speaking in tongues. And then Bell remembered the alien language translated to English on that roll of papers from the altar. Yes; it had to be that. The Pugmires had given the boy a strong religious foundation, like mothers and fathers were expected to do. “Can I see what you were drawing there, mate? I saw your drawings back at the apartment; you’re quite an imaginative artist. C’mon, let me see.” He extended his hand.

The boy’s smile remained but his eyes narrowed slightly. He looked wary or cunning, and the effect on his young features wasn’t pleasant. Bell switched to a sterner tone of voice, wiggled his fingers. He was prepared to pry the ball loose if he had to.

“Give me the picture, buddy.”

The boy giggled, and relented. He passed the crumpled drawing to Bell, who smoothed the crinkled paper on the table top.

Like those at the apartment, it was a perplexing pattern of lines, angles and curves like some mathematical equation, but rendered in silver ink so that it resembled the web of a deranged spider. In some respects it bore a resemblance to the tattoo that Irene had told Bell the boy wore on his chest. “Very nice. Interesting. What is this design, guy? Does this mean something?”

“A gate,” the boy replied.

“A gate. Is this Yog…whatever?”

“This is Yog Sothoth.” The boy touched his sternum. “The spheres within spheres. Gate, key, and guardian in one. I am Yog Sothoth.”

Bell said nothing for several moments. It was sad. Whether his family had made him this way, or Kaddish had frightened him to madness, the six year old was deeply in need of psychological help. He hoped C. S. got here soon to tend to him. He hoped the kid could be salvaged.

“May I keep this picture, pal?” The child said nothing. Only stared, and smiled. Bell folded the drawing and tucked it into his shirt pocket, rose from the table. “Thanks. Maybe I’ll come back and see you later, okay?” Then he turned, and moved to the door.

He was glad to leave.

««—»»

“I knew you’d come in to see me,” said Joshua Kaddish.

“This is my precinct. I’m homicide.” Bell drew closer to the softly humming barrier of the jail cell, a field of magnetic force, transparent but illuminated a soft blue so that it would be immediately evident it was activated. “Did you kill those people just as an excuse to see me again?”

Seated on a chair directly facing the barrier, Kaddish snorted softly at the joke. “A coincidence, Johnny. Then again, there’s no such thing. Maybe we were meant to meet up again, huh? Who knows the blueprint of the universe?” At this last question he gave an odd little smile.

It was a common enough expression for him, all too familiar to Bell. Kaddish’s gray eyes were at least as sly and mysteriously amused as his cat-curl smile. His ears were almost impish and nearly pointed, lending him more of a darkly mischievous look. His short, dark auburn hair was gelled and brushed back and he wore a light-colored beard of several days. He was trim, dressed neatly for an alleged psychopath in a crisp white shirt with the cuffs rolled back and black trousers. His voice was calm, its accent British. He seemed composed enough considering his situation, but Bell knew his smiles could conceal a lot. He knew the man was volatile—but capable of the carnage he had seen back at the apartment complex?

“Can you get me a cigarette, Johnny? I know you don’t smoke, yourself.”

Bell ignored the request. “Why did you do it, Josh?”

“She was beautiful. She wanted me. And she wasn’t a good choice of wife for you.”

Bell drew in a long breath, reining in his control over his emotions. Barely. “I mean why did you murder those people, not why did you fuck my wife.”

“Well, don’t you think we should get that out of the way before we move on to the other? It’s obviously been what’s stood between the two of us talking, these past years.”

“Who were you to judge that she wasn’t a good wife for me?”

“She slept with me, didn’t she? She was sleeping with another man, too. I forget his name now. I followed them, took vids to show you. A little freebie detective job. I wanted you to know what she was really like, pal. She wasn’t the wife you wanted her to be. You were blinded by her looks.”

“So you were doing me a favor. You didn’t want to sleep with her for your own sake.”

“Of course I did, Johnny. She was lovely. But I wouldn’t have seduced her if she’d been really right for you. I killed two birds with one stone. I was going to show you those vids, but then…well, I employed another method of showing you her true colors. But I did send you those vids. Did you ever look at them?”

“No. I tossed them in the zapper. I thought they were vids of you and her.”

“Me and her? Christ, man, you think I would gloat like that?’

“You’re gloating now.”

“I’m not gloating, Johnny.” The feline smile was gone, and Kaddish nearly looked sincere. “I didn’t want to hurt you. But you wouldn’t listen. I warned you about her. I knew her better than you did, in the beginning.”

“It was none of your business, no matter what she was capable of. It was my marriage. My wife. My life. My decision to make, my problem to deal with.”

“You were crazy marrying her.”

“I was crazy ever having a friend like you. I guess I’m not a good judge of character.”

“Just a wee naive, is all. And where is she now, Johnny? I haven’t seen her around, either.”

“We’re divorced.”

“Good.” Kaddish held Bell’s gaze without blinking, waiting to see what came next.

“Why did you kill those people?”

Kaddish rose from the chair, half turned away from his visitor. He had been given a marker to do a crossword puzzle in a hard copy of the morning news, and he tapped the capped pen against the bare white wall of the tiny holding cell as if testing it for weak spots.

“I met another lovely woman, Johnny. Her name is Kate Redgrove. She’s an archaeologist.”

“I don’t think she sounds good enough for you, Josh. Maybe I should sleep with her.”

“We’ve already broken up, I’m afraid. But I learned a lot from her. There’s a bad time coming, Johnny. It’s already begun. There are people who’ve been waiting a long time for this. Some dreading it…and others, like those cultists I—that you saw … those people have been trying to make this thing come about.”

“What thing?”

“There are beings outside our reality. Outside our space, time and dimension. They’ve been worshipped as gods, because we’re amoebas to then—dogs at best, when they need us. I can’t believe there are those who try to help them come through. Do they really think they’ll reward them? Give them power? When they don’t need these fools anymore, they’ll squash them like bugs.”

My God, Bell thought, he is insane.

“They’re known as the Old Ones, the Great Old Ones, the Outsiders. By other names in other cultures and religions on a hundred planets. They once ruled everything…long before us. They may have seeded humans throughout many systems, like we’d plant crops. Sometimes for labor. Sometimes for food. Not for the Old Ones themselves; they don’t need to eat to survive. For all intents and purposes, they’re immortal. But there are lesser beings. Spawn. Minions. More corporeal in the way we understand it. They seem to feast on us sometimes…though I don’t know if it’s blood they feed on, or the essence of life itself. Anyway, I think the Old Ones also might have seeded us because they wanted us around to help them come back through if they ever got locked out. Because that’s exactly what happened. Another powerful amalgamation of beings—the Elder Gods—came and overpowered them. Locked them up, locked them out.”

“This girlfriend of yours told you all this?”

Kaddish turned back to face the police inspector, smiling, tapping the pen against his own chest now. “I know it sounds crazy, pal, but there’s no way to make it sound sane. No one with influence has ever wanted to believe it. It’s too big, too scary to believe. There’s always been a few eccentrics and geniuses who uncovered some hints, investigated. More often than not, they didn’t survive to pass on to the masses what they’d learned. Or else, they were considered too mad to believe. And sometimes they were mad, though they didn’t start out that way.”

“Is this Kate Redgrove mad, then?”

“Kate? She’s as cool as gun metal, Johnny. She’s quite a woman. I think you’d better go talk to her yourself.”

“I intend to. But why do you think I should?”

“Because you don’t believe any of what I’m saying.”

“What do these, ah, god-like entities have to do with what you did? Are you saying those people you killed…”

“They worshipped the Old Ones. And worse than that, these idiots were trying to pick the locks on their cells. Open the gates and the windows. In every way they could. Chants, rituals. It’s always been said that the Old Ones would return when ‘the stars were right.’ That means, when the conditions of space and time were optimum for them to break free of the prisons the Elder Gods left them in. ‘In strange eons,’ the dead gods are supposed to be resurrected. Well, it’s time, Johnny. The stars are right. The strange eons are now.”

“Says Kate.”

“Yes. But I knew it was getting very close from watching the cult, too. I’d been watching them for a while. They were stepping up their activity. I had to stop them.” The smug smile drained out of Kaddish’s face; even from his eyes. “Believe me, I had to do it. Before they could do more damage. But they’re not the only cult in Punktown. There are even more cults on Earth.”

“Does Kate intend to kill any of these cult people?”

“No. I can’t see her doing that.”

“Well, you messed up, Josh. You got caught. Now it looks like those other cults will just go on chanting and opening the doors for these super-aliens.”

“That’s just what they’ll do, John. They have to be stopped. You have to get me out of here.”

“You murdered…”

“I was truth-scanned when your people took my confession. I told them my story then. Go look at the scan. You’ll see I’m not lying.”

“Maybe you aren’t, but the scan will only prove that you believe in what you’re saying. It doesn’t mean it really happened, except in the mind of a madman suffering some very paranoid delusions.”

“Then you have to take a memory recording. Play it back, Johnny. You’ll see for yourself that it’s no delusion…the thing I saw in that apartment. I shot it, for Chrissakes.”

“What thing?”

“A few days ago I smuggled a bug into the cult’s apartment in their mail. I heard them summoning something up, so I moved in on them…and when I busted in, they were calling up a creature. I don’t know what it was, exactly. Some lesser being. A hound, some call them. It’s easier to let the minions in, the ones that are more material in the way we understand. This thing was being manifested right in the middle of the living room when I burst in on them. I shot at the thing, and it disappeared into the corner.”

The corner. Bell had seen the bullet holes there. “It just walked into the wall, huh?”

“It passed out of this dimension. There’s a kind of geometry involved in opening some of the portals. Certain signs and patterns can open them up.”

“Is that what that red symbol was you painted in the corner, and on the door to their apartment? A portal?”

“No—that was the sign of the Elder Gods. Kate showed it to me. The Elder Gods used it to seal up the Old Ones. It has great power against them.”

“Like, oh, a crucifix against vampires, huh?”

“I sprayed the sign on the door to keep out other beings or agents that might try to come to the apartment later. Even if it gets painted over, it’s still there. And I painted the symbol in the corner to keep the hound from coming back out of the wall. They like corners. Something about the angles. The geometry.”

Bell tossed his head far back and let out a weary laugh. “The hounds like comers. Ohh…this is steaming dung, you know that? Do you think my chief will waste the time and resources to have your memories recorded and played back, the way you’re talking?”

Kaddish came very close to the blue-tinted barrier, so that its glow gave him a chill, corpse-like appearance. “I’ll tone down my talk around everyone else but you. But you have to get that recording made, pal. You have to see for yourself. And show them, too, afterwards. Time is running out. The cults have to be stopped. Their books, their relics, it all has to be destroyed. At least get them to record the last day of my memories. How difficult can that be? Just one day, tell them. Just today.”

Bell was wagging his head. “What happened to you, Josh?”

“Will you tell them?”

“I’ll ask them to do the recording, yes—okay?”

Kaddish seemed to relax slightly, found a shred of his smile again. “How’s the kid?” he asked a little sheepishly.

“We can’t get through to him. I think he’s traumatized by what he saw.”

Kaddish seemed almost to wince, looked away. “I was trying to drop him off someplace where he’d be taken care of.”

“All he can do is babble a bunch of gibberish and talk nonsense like what you’re telling me.”

Kaddish looked warily back at his old friend. “Gibberish? What’s he been telling you? Things about the cult?”

“He isn’t ‘telling’ us anything. Just some kind of language that sounded made up as he went along, and he says he’s a gate. A gate and a guardian and a key, all at the same…”

“Jesus! Oh fucking hell! My God!” Kaddish whirled, paced violently, his reaction and actions so sudden that Bell was startled back a half-step, as if afraid Kaddish could fling himself straight through the magnetic field. “Yog-Sothoth!”

“Yes,” Bell said. “He told me his name is Yog Sothoth.”

“He isn’t Yog-Sothoth. But he’s been made an extension. He says he’s the gate? They’ve turned the boy into one of their portals. Yog-Sothoth will reach through him. And if Yog-Sothoth opens the gate, then the worst of the gates will be open.”

“What are you saying?”

“I shouldn’t have let him go. I should have killed him, too. How could I have let this happen? I got caught trying to help him, and all along he was the one I should have killed first.”

“You’re out of your mind, Josh. Listen to yourself. You’re totally fucking…”

“Listen to me!” Kaddish bellowed, halting from his pacing and stabbing a finger toward the barrier. “You have to believe me! The Old Ones have to be kept out! You have to sedate that boy. I know you won’t kill him, but you have to immobilize him. Drug him, put him in suspended animation, but you can’t let him go free!”

“He’s in our custody.”

“You can’t stop him from opening the gate by fucking baby-sitting him! Jesus, John, you have to record my memories immediately. You hear me? You have to see that I’m telling the truth about the danger to all of us! To the Earth and the whole fucking universe!”

The Earth. Had Kaddish heard about the loss of contact with the mother world? Bell felt foolish for letting himself connect that alarming mystery with the ranting of his old friend.

“I’ll arrange the recording right now, all right? But if you don’t calm down, they’ll just consider you a raving lunatic like I do and throw you in a psych center.”

“The boy is still here? He’s in this building?”

“Yes.”

“Watch him, Johnny. For God’s sake, don’t let anyone take him away.”

“We can’t keep him in a cell in here forever. We’re trying to find family. Family that you haven’t executed.”

“Don’t let him leave here, John, I’m warning you. He’s one of them. Worse. I should have figured it out before.”

“Where does this Kate Redgrove live?”

“In Beaumonde Square, off the P. U. campus. 19 Cobble Plaza, second floor.”

“Second floor. 19 Cobble Plaza. Money, huh?”

“Rich Earth family. Yeah, go see Kate. Tell her what I did. Tell her about the boy, what he told you he was. And Johnny? Tell her that I still love her. Will you?”

“Yeah, yeah—I’ll tell her.”

“John. I am sorry about the wife. Truly. It was brash. It was stupid. And it was selfish.”

“It was a thrill you couldn’t resist. Sleeping with your best friend’s wife. I think you used all that dung about concern for me just as an excuse, Josh. Maybe we should truth-scan you on that, while we’re at it.”

“We’ll talk about it again another day, John. I can see you aren’t inclined to believe me now, and there are more pressing matters.”

“Well, you got that much right. I’ll go ask them now if they can do that recording.”

“Insist, John! Insist!”

“I’ll see ya.” And with that, Bell left his old friend standing at the humming barrier, Kaddish’s eyes glowing eerily with its reflected light as he anxiously watched him depart.

- 3 -

Bell’s hovercar rode two feet above the street, and it would appear to require a stronger than usual repulsor field to hold it aloft, but the huge, heavy-looking replica Edsel was actually constructed of lightweight, durable ceramic. In hover mode, its wheels tucked up into their cavities. When Bell had first seen the car, its amphibian face and distinctive grille had won him over immediately. When he found out about the original’s reputation as a fluke, well, that was only the icing on the cake. He loved the monstrosity.

The original, no matter how controversial in its day, had not possessed the monitor screen on its dash which Bell spoke to now. Graf’s Choom face filled the screen.

“I’m taking the recording now,” the forensics tech reported, “but the chief would only agree to go back a day, for now, to record the crime as it took place.”

“Good enough.”

“You don’t really expect to see anything like Kaddish described…”

“Of course not. But we’ll see what he did do. Clear up a couple of mysteries, like why he really fired into the corner, and how those marks in the carpet got there. If nothing more, it will prove his guilt in court and save the tax payers from footing a long trial.”

“It wouldn’t have been a long trial even without his memories. He admits he killed them, and we have a truth scan. The scan says everything he told us was straight. At least, that he believes everything he told us is straight. He really believes he chased a monster into the corner, and put a few slugs into it. He might be totally burnt, but he’s not lying to us.”

“Any drugs in his system? Absinthe?”

“No sign of him ever taking that. He’s clean.”

“I wonder if this Kate Redgrove is on something. I don’t know what she did to Kaddish’s mind. Although Kaddish felt he had to destroy the cult, his delusions and theirs are based on the same belief in the same things. Just that he opposes the beliefs, and they embrace them.”

“Mm. Oh—hey, you should put the news on, John. They’ve lost all contact with Luna and Mars, now, too. There were a few panicky-sounding transmissions, and then they got cut off. Whatever’s blocking Earth communications seems to be spreading outward.”

“Jesus. Did any of the transmissions hint at what’s going on?”

“Somebody was saying something about a gaseous fog everywhere…a cloud. ‘A cloud with mouths.’ Lots of mouths. Crazy stuff. Creepy to hear it, though; they played a bit of the transmission on the air. These people were really scared. I don’t know what they actually saw, but reminded me of a recording I heard once of a shuttle going into a crash landing. Gave me the chills.”

“Wow,” Bell murmured inadequately.

“Anyhow, I’ll get back to you when I have a look at his recording.”

“Mm,” Bell grunted.

He stopped at an intersection, his vehicle idling but his mind hurtling on ahead, though it wasn’t sure of direction, maybe not even of destination. All around him, the colony city of Punktown loomed; skyscrapers slate gray or mirror bright, as ornamented as gothic cathedrals or as smooth and featureless as obelisks. Smaller buildings with skins of brick or tile, bright pebbled mosaic or pastel stucco, crowded around the bases of the titans. Piercing the ash sky were minarets both glittering new or tarnished and with masonry crumbling. There were plastic gargoyles leering down at him from on high, like taunting demons. There was a bronze angel lifting a sword above its androgynous head, atop a dome of verdigris green. Elegant Art Deco scallops and tiers, and structures of metal like giant primitive engines, grease-stained and covered in incomprehensible mechanical detail.

It was a many-faced tribute to the power of ingenuity, the perseverance of living things, of survival in a universe mindlessly hostile toward life, beneficial to life apparently only by accident. So many races, so many varied interpretations on life, had come together here—not always harmoniously, by any means, but successfully—to erect a temple of sorts to the god of Life itself. Surrounded by these colossal edifices, watching the teeming masses on the sidewalks, the hordes of vehicles on ground level and even in the air, it was hard to believe that Earth—its cities far greater still than this one—could be under any kind of devastating threat. Let alone the Armageddon, the Doomsday, that Kaddish predicted like one of those scripture-quoting fanatics who seemed to haunt cities everywhere. There was history here, behind every building’s style of construction and ornament, telling of the civilizations, the cultures, the religions that had brought them here to this world—like solid foundations that were built on a bed of time. This was not a fragile scene. This was strength. Only Nature was stronger, and was that even true, when these beings had drained many a verdant planet dry and turned many an ocean black to reach this pinnacle of power? What natural cataclysm could have befallen Earth that its inhabitants couldn’t foresee far ahead, and take measures to divert or repel? And yet something had happened, hadn’t it? But what?

Bell reminded himself that most of the cultures represented in the vista around him had developed weapons that could level a Punktown in one bright flash, no matter how immortal its appearance. Even turn this planet of Oasis to a charred ball. And if these lowly creatures, all more or less equivalent in their technology, could render such horror…well, what might a vastly superior race of beings be capable of?

Bell sighed the thought out of him. He wasn’t letting Kaddish distort his thoughts the way this Kate Redgrove had obviously distorted his, was he?

The current of traffic changed, and once again his Edsel was surging forward, toward Beaumonde Square, one of the nicer regions of a much blighted city. Blight was a kind word. The crime in Punktown was legendary, even an Earth. The poverty in some slums made a bygone city like Earth’s Calcutta seem tolerable. There had been riots in these streets, a devastating earthquake that had buried whole branches of the subway and the subterranean sectors of the city. And yet it still survived. Life still clung tenaciously to its streets. Again, if there could ever be a threat such as Kaddish alluded to—a threat to the Earth, mightier still—it would have to be a tremendously dangerous force. It would have to be something like one of those doomsday weapons. Worse, really, since even against those there were defenses and counter-measures.

A cloud with mouths. Lots of mouths. What had the Mars colonists witnessed that could be construed that way?

He drew nearer to Beaumonde Square, whose inhabitants feared changes in the stock market more than cataclysms of nature or evil gods.

His vidscreen beeped him. He reactivated it. Again, Graf was there, but looking more intense than several minutes ago.

“John—I’ve seen the memory recording.”

“And?”

“You want to come back and see it on the spectacles, or should I play it for you now?”

“Put it on.”

“You’d better pull over first.”

Bell parked the Edsel in the lot of a library of traditional Choom design. “Go on,” he told the tech.

The film had been shot from Kaddish’s point of view, the cameras being his eyes. If he were wearing the viewer that Graf had worn to watch the recording, Bell would feel that he was experiencing these memories through his own eyes. But even watching them played out on a tiny screen, with the sounds of the city around him, it was still an unsettling experience. Doubly so, considering the owner of these memories.

Bell watched Kaddish’s hand paint the red star/eye with its pupil of flame on the apartment door. The sign of the—what?—Elder Gods, he had called it.

Next Kaddish extended an illegal device burglars used to defeat certain styles of locks. Bell owned one himself. Its beam cut the bolt in one silent second. The door opened.

Whirling to face Bell on the screen was the living face of Willy Pugmire. Chaos unfolded now at a dizzying speed. There was a cry of outrage transforming into a cry of fear all in one smoothly blended moment. The loud blasting of a handgun with no silencing features. Solid projectiles rather than bolts of energy found their mark. Kaddish’s obsession seemed to demand the thunder of righteousness and the spilling of sacrificial blood.

“Shit!” Bell hissed, sitting closer to the screen. “What is that?”

Pugmire had fallen, and now Kaddish was firing at something that had been obscured behind the man. Something in the center of the room.

It moved across the room, into the comer. Bell heard Kaddish roaring his own fear and outrage after his target. His bullets pursued it. And then it was gone.

Pugmire’s wife had run screaming into the kitchen. Kaddish whirled away from the corner, darted in there after her. Bell felt as if he himself shot her dead, and flinched at the reports.

Confused voices from deeper in the apartment. Two others, startled from sleep. Kaddish bolted down the hall to find them. He found them, all wide eyes in the hot flashes of gas from his gun, like deer caught in headlights. The collision of bullets with flesh and bone.

In the remaining bedroom Kaddish found the boy cowering in the closet. Kaddish pulled him out. The child didn’t have time to grab the knife that was hidden under the mattress. Bell knew about it; Kaddish hadn’t. Kaddish had been lucky.

Before he left the apartment, Kaddish sprayed the pentagram in the corner where the…hound…had vanished. As he turned for the door, holding the boy’s shirt in one fist and the gun still in the other, Kaddish’s frantic viewpoint fell on the altar. That odd black gem or carving on its fossil table. He extended the gun, pointed it at the carving, and pulled the trigger. It clicked. Empty. He had unloaded the magazine of solid projectiles into his victims, and into the corner.

Bell could hear the alarmed exclamations of neighbors. The boy struggled against Kaddish. He could not remain to reload his gun and point it at the crystal again. With his prisoner, he fled the apartment…

“End recording!” Bell blurted to the screen. Blood throbbed in his ears. “Graf, run it back again. Right after he shoots Pugmire, put the play into slowmo.”

Graf complied, and the memories unfolded once more. At the requested moment, as Pugmire went down, the recording went into slow motion. This time, Bell had a better look at the creature that was revealed behind him, seen through a spray of arterial blood. A shiver blew up through the hollows in Bell’s body.

It was the height of a man, but that was the extent of its anthropomorphic traits. The creature was torpedo-shaped, all black and rubbery, and moved across the room upright with an obscene flopping motion that might have been comical had it not been so hideous. In regular playback, the swaying from side to side had been quick but awkward, as if this was not the thing’s normal mode of locomotion, or its intended environment or medium.

Gill-like slits opened and closed on the thing’s smooth sides as if it gasped for air. In this and in its general shape, it was like a shark without fins, tail—or head. Its means of locomotion were flippers or pseudopods at its base, with black claws curling out of them, as cruel as an eagle’s. It was these that tore the carpet as it moved. The thing had no other limbs, except for one tentacle—or was it a tongue?—that lashed out of the hole in the top of its body. This opening had five flaps, a somewhat grayer color like that vaguely translucent tongue or limb that thrashed uncannily in slow motion.

And in slow motion, Kaddish’s bullets tore into the rubbery flesh of the being. A thick bluish fluid spattered out into the air and ran down its flanks, though Bell had seen no such fluid at the crime scene. Graf would have to go back to see if it had soaked thoroughly into the carpet, or evaporated totally.

In regular play, the creature had emitted short, sharp, guttural cries. Almost like barks. It was the only reason Bell could imagine for its moniker, unless its function to its masters was as some loyal animal.

In slowed play, its barks and Kaddish’s own cry were unearthly, blending together into a terrible sepulchral groan.

When the creature reached the corner, it vanished into the joining point of the walls, as if it or the walls were merely an illusion.

“Jesus,” Bell exhaled. Gone, like an apparition. An apparition that could bleed. “Graf?”

The recorded memories vanished. Graf returned. “It’s real, boss. If Kaddish was hallucinating, the hallucinations would be in his mind only. This isn’t what his mind interpreted, but the physical reality his eyes perceived.”

“It’s something from another plane of existence. Another dimension.”

“I’ve seen a lot of exotic fauna come through this town, but never anything like that baby.”

“Graf…did you take that crystal thing from the scene with you?”

“Yeah, we have it here. It looked like it might be of value, so we thought it best to put it in the vault. Why? You were wondering why Kaddish tried to blast it?”

“Yeah. I’m also wondering why he didn’t put his gun down a second to take it. He wasn’t thinking.” Bell glanced up and out the windshield as two teenage Choom girls pranced up the front steps of the library, sharing innocent laughter. Ignorant laughter. The mundane image did not soothe Bell’s disorienting sensation of vertigo. It only served to worsen it, by contrast. Seeing him watching them, one of the girls gave him an obscene gesture before ducking after her friend into the building. So much for innocent laughter, but Bell was too absorbed to let it irritate him. “What else did Josh tell me that I should believe?”

“What did he tell you in there, John?”

“Show the chief the recording. And tell him not to let that boy leave the station, no matter how many C. S. people or family members come for him. He isn’t to leave our custody until I can talk to the chief himself about it. Understood?”

“I’ll tell him, but you tell me what Kaddish told you.”

“I will. But right now I have to go talk to Kate Redgrove. If anything else Josh told me has truth to it, we might be under a kind of…deadline here.”

- 4 -

On the outside of Kate Redgrove’s apartment door there was a red five-pointed star with an eye, perhaps, at its center—the pupil, if such it were, being a pillar of flame.

This one was not crudely spray-painted, but very neatly done, as if it had been masked off first. Still, Bell found it no less dramatic. He stabbed his finger into the buzzer several times more, though his buzzing from the lobby had gone unanswered. Beside him stood Mr. L’Vesk, the apartment manager, who had agreed to escort the inspector up here when his attempts to contact the archaeologist failed. Before L’Vesk had agreed to accompany him, however, he had first tried calling Ms. Redgrove on her vidphone. The calls had also gone unanswered.

“I can’t believe I let her talk me into painting that thing,” the spindly humanoid sighed, nervously drumming together pale fingers twice as long as the detective’s. “Her neighbors are not happy with it. But she was so set on it, and she’s been a fine tenant except for that. She teaches over at P. U., you know.”

Bell rang her again. “Damn,” he whispered.

“Maybe she’s out. Over at the school. Or she might not want to be disturbed, you know; she’s always been extremely insistent that I never let anyone up here unless she knows about it in advance.”

“Open it.”

“I…well, do you have a warrant, Inspector?”

“No, but you’re the manager, right? You can voluntarily open it for me.” If the being refused, there was always the lock-cutter device in an inner pocket of his leather jacket.

L’Vesk sighed, and moved past Bell to tap out a code on the keypad by the door frame. The apartment manager held open the door, stuck his tiny head in, and promptly withdrew it with a rattling gasp of horror.

Bell pushed past him, drawing his pistol from its holster under his jacket. “Go call Precinct House 15. Tell them to send some people over here, quick!”

Once inside, Bell shut the door behind him.

Kate Redgrove sat on a sofa at the far end of the parlor, slumped to one side with her chin resting on her chest. She was as white as a cave-dwelling animal. She wore a suit of comfortable, loose-fitting men’s pajamas, the front unbuttoned. Or torn open. In the center of her chest, above her heart, there was a large circular wound, so deep that the blackness within her seemed an awful void.

As Bell moved closer to her, wondering if the wound had been caused by a bolt from a ray pistol, he noticed the tear marks on the lovely white carpet.

He swung around with his chunky black pistol held out before him, eyes large and flicking in their sockets. Before he examined the corpse more closely, he stealthily moved through the rest of the apartment. He found no lurking intruders, human or otherwise. Only slightly at ease, he returned to the body propped on the living room couch.

He knelt down to gaze up into her face. As Kaddish had told his ex-friend, his ex-lover was beautiful, her short dark hair hanging softly around a delicate face with large, dark brown eyes that were now half-veiled by their lids in death. Bell took his eyes quickly from her face, switched his study to the wound in her chest, between her slight breasts. Her skin looked like wax. There was no blood around the wound, on her clothing or the sofa or the immaculate carpet. Bell knew from the look of her that no blood would be found inside her body, either. But there was another fluid along the rim of the great puncture wound. It was thick, syrupy, and a ghastly blue color that was almost luminous. Bell remembered the memory of a thrashing tentacle. Or tongue.

The Elder Sign might have repelled intruders from her front door, but they had found another way to send an assassin. And Bell didn’t doubt that the assassin was the same being or creature Pugmire had summoned up, perhaps for this very purpose. Kaddish had not wounded it enough to kill it—if it could be killed.

Bell rose, still holding his gun by his side, and glanced around at the woman’s things. A series of shelves along one wall drew him for a closer inspection. There were framed photographs of Kate Redgrove with friends and colleagues at various digs, apparently on various worlds. On one planet they had worked inside a giant bubble, it seemed, Bell guessing that the atmosphere had been unsuitable for humans. In fact, what he could see of the landscape through the transparent wall behind them had a lunar appearance, though Bell didn’t know what ancient civilization might be excavated on an airless moon.

More notable than the photos, however, were the artifacts on display behind the glass cabinets of the shelves. They were lit and labeled with cards as if exhibited in a museum. There were vases in whole or part, a row of crude iron chisels that might be weapons or tools, a human bust with white eyes and its nose and lips broken away, as if all of its senses had been robbed. A bowl with the painting of a naked Choom warrior inside it. A small stone tablet with carven lines in some unfathomable language, and above that portraying in bas-relief a sphinx or griffin-like creature with wings somewhat like a bat’s and the head of an octopus, with a nest of tentacles in place of a mouth. Bell looked at the card for this piece.

“Oasis. Choom. Irezk Island Tribe. 19th Cent. Cthulhu.”

Bell frowned, disturbed by the strange, abstracted image and feeling that he should understand or recognize that last word on the card. Unable to, he shifted his attention to another artifact.

This looked to be more of organic origin than shaped by the hands of an artisan or craft-maker. It was a large fossil that he had at first thought was a great shallow bowl carved from stone, standing on its end inside the cabinet. Ringing the bowl were thick spines or spikes, some little more than blunt bumps and others long and sharp like the horns of a dinosaur. Bell couldn’t imagine what sort of animal it might have come from, or even what part of the body of an animal it might be from. Was it a shell or carapace? A portion of skull? A half of a pelvis? A lower jaw, a scoop-like hand? Some fragment of anatomy for which there was no terrestrial counterpart? Again, he read its card, standing on his toes to see it.

“Oasis. Irezk Island. 225,000,000 B.C. Fragment Old One? Spawn?”

“Jesus,” Bell breathed.

The sharp barking cry behind him made him spin around. The thing was rushing at him, flopping madly from side to side like a man with his legs bound, and his arms too, for it had none. Just that tongue or tentacle, whipping out of the opening atop its body. Its claws tore up the carpet as it flung itself toward him.

Bell thrust his gun at the thing as if the action of his arm alone would make the bolts of energy fly from it. Bell’s beam weapon fired short lances of a dark violet light. They pierced the creature, bored round holes from which drooled that blue blood or mucus. Bell backed into the shelves. He cried out in terror and rage. The creature barked in rage and maybe pain. But it kept coming.

Behind the creature, Josh Kaddish leapt out of the walls where they joined together in the corner. He fell to his knees, looked up at Bell, his eyes crazed in a squirming black mask. There were black leeches half covering his face, his white shirt, some as big as lampreys or remoras with primitive flippered tails thrashing, their mouths fixed to his skin.

Bell nearly quit firing into the creature, so shocked was he by this manifestation. He was confounded even more when Kaddish got to his feet and bolted from the room as if running for his life.

“Help me!” Bell roared, and aimed higher up, at the tongue and its five-lobed mouth. Several beams tore through the base of the tentacle and out the other side, spattering bits of rubbery flesh. Bell heard glass shatter somewhere as his beams passed through. The limb’s frenzied whipping only became more violent.

He darted sideways as the creature reached the shelves, smashing into them blindly. Perhaps it was blind in this dimension, and followed the smell of his blood or the hum of his life force inside him.

Dancing sideways, putting more space between him and the being, he whirled and fired into it again. And now Josh Kaddish had returned, came to his side. Most of the slugs were gone from him, Bell saw peripherally, the rest dropping off him and writhing in the fibers of the pristine carpet.

Kaddish had a pistol in each fist, and began adding his onslaught to Bell’s. One bucking handgun fired solid projectiles with a deafening report, the other launched gel caps filled with a corrosive green plasma. Where these hit, larger wounds began to open in the shiny, dolphin-like hide of the being, the uneven edges of the wounds bubbling and sizzling. One wound joined with the next, making yet larger wounds. Inside, the creature was all slick pulsing blackness. Bell now aimed his beams into that blackness. Under this fusillade, the creature finally toppled, and began a terrible flopping on its side like a fish drowning in the air. Bell and Kaddish had to fast-shuffle backwards to give it more room in which to convulse, but they didn’t relent in their conjoined attack.

The creature, much torn and melted through the middle, split into two large pieces. To Bell’s horror, both began to make their way back toward the corner of the room from which it had appeared—the upper half pulling itself along with its serpentine limb, the lower half dragging itself with the talons which had served as toes, before.

“Keep shooting!” Kaddish bellowed. “Here!” He passed Bell the gun loaded with plasma capsules, then rushed to the shelves of artifacts. Out of the corner of his eye, firing both pistols at the ends of his extended arms, Bell saw Kaddish sliding open one of the cabinets and withdrawing some small item.

“All right!” Kaddish yelled. “Hold fire!” Bell did, and saw the private detective lunge after the hideous crawling shapes. He was holding out the item he had taken from the shelf, and actually pushed it into one of the holes Bell’s rays had punched into its flesh. He then leapt away, and covered his face as if expecting an explosion.

It was apparent why a second later, as a smoke or vapor as black as squid’s ink and just as slow—as if it were spreading underwater rather than in the air—billowed from both portions of the bisected animal or entity. The foulness of the vapor’s stench was so intense that Bell immediately dropped to his knees and vomited. Nothing he had ever smelled at any crime scene, however long the victim had waited to be discovered, could hint at this.

But moments later, the air was clean of both smoke and stench. Lifting his head with a groan, Bell saw that the broken thing had vanished, leaving behind not so much as a drop of its blue fluids on the soft white carpet. Kaddish was crouching close by, cupping one hand over his mouth. When he removed the hand, he was smiling that cat-curl smile.

“We killed it. We killed one of their bloody hounds!”

Bell gestured with his gun toward the couch. Kaddish started to look around, but stopped himself. His smile dissipated. “I know. I saw her there. Fucking demons. They’ll pay for that.” He stood, held up his remaining pistol. “I bought these for Kate, to protect herself. They caught her off guard.”

Bell slowly got to his feet, fighting to hold onto what little else his stomach contained. Adrenalin crackled through the wires of his nerves. He realized that all the slugs had dropped off Kaddish now, and dissolved from the carpet, also leaving no trace. “How the Christ did you get here?” he asked.

“Same way that thing did. Through the wall. But I went through the lines, and it went through the curves. I picked up some stowaways on the way, but they didn’t last.” He rubbed at his neck, looked at his palm as if for blood, but he was unmarked.

“Have you done that before?”

“No. Never. But your friends left me no choice. I knew I could chance it if I had to. I kept a diagram in my pocket, and I copied the formula into the corner of my cell back at your precinct house. You can thank your friends for giving me that marker. You should have remembered, Johnny, that I’ve never done a crossword puzzle in my life.”

“Are you crazy? Huh? How did you think you could survive that? How did you find your way?”

“I was lost a few minutes, I admit. I suppose it was a few minutes. You can’t tell time in there. It’s…not something I can describe. I was disoriented. I started to panic, especially when those things started swarming onto me. The diagram was supposed to get me back to my apartment in an emergency, if I ever got cornered or trapped. Kate drew it up for me. But then I saw or sensed the beastie, and I followed it here. Good for you, huh? I really do think some force, at least, is on our side. Fate, or maybe even—Them.” He walked to the spot where the being had dissolved, bent, picked up something from the carpet. He came to Bell and showed him a stone disc resting in the palm of his hand. It bore an etched star, and at the center of the star was an eye-like design, with a band of fire for its pupil if indeed it were an eye.

“The sign of the Elder Gods,” Bell said.

“Like a crucifix against a vampire. Remember? Do you believe me, now, pal?”

Bell’s hand phone beeped on his belt. He unclipped it, brought it up before his face. “Bell here.”

It was the commander of P.H. 15, Chief Bellioc. His face was like a living postage stamp on the device’s tiny screen. “John, your friend Kaddish is gone.”

Bell almost said, “I know.” Instead, he said, “Gone?”

“Check this out. We had a camera on him the whole time he was in his cell—standard procedure. I’m going to run you the end of the vid.” Bellioc’s face was replaced by a scene of Kaddish in his cell, shot from a corner of the ceiling. Kaddish was finishing up a drawing in the corner, a black web of lines and angles. He was using the edge of the folded newspaper he’d requested to make them as straight as he could.

He finished a last line, stepped back to admire his handiwork for several moments while capping the marker and slipping it into his breast pocket. Then, he extended an arm—which vanished into the white wall as if it were a pool of milk.

“Unbelievable,” Bell said, even as he watched Kaddish walk into the wall and disappear, leaving only that web of black lines to mark his passage.

Bellioc returned. “I saw the memory recording of that creature, too. Do you know what the hell is going on, here?”

“Ah. I think…I’m not entirely sure. But…”

“I’m putting a call into Colonial Headquarters. I think they should send some of their security force in here. We’re dealing with some uncatalogued life forms here. And God knows about these portals…these dimensional…”

“I think that’s a good idea, chief. Get them in on this. And keep everybody out of that cell.Keep the barrier up. There’s no telling what might come out of that opening, now.”

“The boy!” Kaddish hissed. “The kid!”

“That boy,” Bell said into the device. “Chief, don’t let anyone take him. Trust me. Don’t let C. S. have him. We have to keep him in custody. Under guard.”

“What do you know about all this, John? You obviously know a lot more than you’re telling me.”

“I’ll fill you in, chief, but I have to get my head together first. I’m not sure what I’ve seen or how to describe it. Just trust me for a little while. I’m on this. I’m trying to find out what it’s about. In the meantime, all I can do is ask you to keep that boy under lock and key.”

Bellioc’s diminutive features did not look pleased, but Bell was his best homicide investigator, not some impulsive rookie. “All right, do whatever it is you’re doing…but when I get the Headquarters to send people over, I’m going to call you back, and I’m going to want you to be here and tell them—and me—everything you know.”

“I will, chief. But until then? Play back the part of the surveillance vid when I went in to interview Kaddish. Listen to what he says. All that crazy dung about an ancient, god-like race? I’m afraid it might be true.”

Over the top of the hand phone, Bell saw Kaddish smiling at him, and nodding in a weary kind of satisfaction.

- 5 -

“We’d better get out of here before the uniforms arrive,” Bell told the other man, handing him back the borrowed gun.

“Are we going together?”

“Yes,” Bell answered, sounding disgusted at himself for saying it. “You’re the expert, apparently, so you tell me where it is we should go.”

“I know of another especially dangerous cult in Tin Town.” Tin Town was one of the least friendly sectors of a generally unfriendly city. Bell had never ventured there, nor did any peace officers, unless pushed into it. “We have to stop them, pal. I don’t know how much time we have left before the doors really come off the hinges, but…”

“You mean kill them, don’t you?”

Kaddish paused, drew in a breath. “Yes. Kill them. We can’t lock them up. They can still perform rituals to a lesser extent, even in custody. You saw what I did, and they know more than I.”

“I won’t be murdering any cults tonight, Josh. And neither will you.”

“You’ve seen the truth, man! Jesus, what does it take? I just walked out of that fucking wall, there!”

“Shit!” Bell hissed, whipping his head around as if someone had whispered in his ear, reminding him of something. Something about walking into walls. Webs that could bend the walls between dimensions. “The kid…”

“What about him?”

Bell unfolded the drawing he had taken from the boy. Lines and angles in silver ink like the symbol of silver ink tattooed on his chest. He passed it to Kaddish. “The boy was drawing things like that in the holding room. Formulas. Like the one you used.”

Kaddish’s eyes leapt up from the paper. “If I escaped that way, he can, too!”

Bell brought his hand phone back up to his face, beeped his precinct house. He didn’t want to have to talk to Bellioc again, however. Bellioc might change his mind, order him back right now. “Put Graf on!” he snapped at the dispatcher. Several moments later, the Choom was there. “Graf—you have to do me a favor, man. Don’t ask why. Go in and take that marker away from the kid from the cult. Make sure he has nothing at all to draw with, understand?”

“Sure. But…”

“Is he being guarded, now?”

“Yes. The chief said you called, and…”

“Tell them to watch him! He might even try to draw in his shit or his blood. Watch him! Keep him at the table. Don’t let him near the corners of the room!”

“The corners? John, look…”

“Do it!” And Bell cut him off, lowered the device.

“He has to be drugged, John. Or put in suspended animation. I’m telling you. He was born and raised to be an extension of Yog-Sothoth. And of all the gates of the Old Ones, Yog-Sothoth is the biggest. The rest are just cracks. Yog-Sothoth is the fucking dam, Johnny, and this kid’s finger is all that’s holding back the flood. Understand? Yog-Sothoth is the gate and the guardian of the gate and the key to the gate, all in one.”

“I’ve got to get back there. I have to fill the chief in now. And you’re coming with me, Josh, I’m sorry. I can’t let you go off killing more people. There has to be another way to handle this. You can tell my chief your story, and the Headquarters agents when they get there.”

Bell fully expected Kaddish to put up an argument, given the strength of his obsession. He was surprised, then, when Kaddish dropped his eyes and slowly nodded in agreement. “All right,” he said quietly, “I’ll go back there with you.”

««—»»

Outside Precinct House 15, lions cast in a pale blue resin flanked the front steps. These terrestrial creatures, no matter how fearsome in aspect, were a weak and ridiculous symbol of protection in the face of the threats Bell had learned of.

Bell was handing over to another officer the two pistols Kaddish had acquired for Kate Redgrove when Chief Bellioc, having heard that Bell had brought his quarry in, came hurriedly into the room. The private detective looked calmly up at the police chief and gave him a pleasant nod.

“So, it’s the magician who performed that disappearing act in his cell,” Bellioc grumbled.

“You must be Chief Bellyache.”

“Don’t fuck with me, you sleazy little piece of dung. I should put you in a nice safe stasis field right now. Tell me what’s happening here. What kind of threat is this to the city?”

“The city?” Kaddish snorted a bitter laugh. On the ride here, Bell had filled him in on the loss of contact with Earth, its moon, the Mars colonies and now, according to the news they had listened to on the Edsel’s radio, outposts on the moons of Jupiter. When asked what he thought the spreading cloud might be, Kaddish had only said under his breath, in a tone of awful reverence, “Azathoth.”

“Sir, the whole Colonial Network—the whole universe—is under threat,” Bell told him. “There are cults still here in Punktown, cults on Earth, that are working to make this happen.”

“John, do you expect me to believe in Satan worshippers calling up demons?”

“Demons, gods, aliens, call them what you want.”

“And what are we supposed to do about it? Go and murder all these cults like your friend here did?”

“We have to see the boy,” Kaddish said. “There’s no more time to argue.”

“He’s under observation,” Bellioc assured him harshly.

“Let me talk to him. I can get him to open up about this. What he has to show us you might find enlightening.”

Bellioc looked to Bell, who nodded. “We’ve got to trust him. He knows more about this than we do, and it doesn’t look like we have much time to learn.”

The precinct commander gestured roughly. “Okay, okay, let’s go.”

As they moved down the corridor toward the holding room where the orphan was being kept, a guard visible outside its force barrier, Kaddish asked Bell, “What became of the Shining Trapezohedron?”

“The what?”

“The black crystal Pugmire had in his apartment.”

“We have that here, in the vault. Why? What’s it do?”

“Not sure, but some say it can be used to view other worlds. Other realms. It may also be a battery of power, a focal point of power…or a door in itself. Whatever it is, it should be destroyed. I never should have left there without it.”

“Like I say, we have it. No one’s gonna touch it.”

They had reached the barrier, and the uniformed forcer stepped aside. The barrier was deactivated, and the boy with the shaven head lifted his head from his arms, crossed before him on the table. He was smiling, and his eyes had locked on Kaddish.

“I’m going to show him something,” Kaddish said, slipping a hand into his pocket.

Bellioc seized his wrist. “What is it? Has he been scanned for weapons, John?”

“Yes.”

“Just this, I want to show him.” Kaddish withdrew the stone disc with the carven eye, and held it out for the chief to see.

Bell saw the boy crane his neck, trying to get a look at what the object was. His smug smile had became less sure, more concerned.

Kaddish turned, and held the seal of the Elder Gods aloft in his left hand for the boy to plainly see.

The boy let out a cry of rage, bolted up from his chair and backed into the wall. He turned his eyes away and tore at the front of his shirt, scattering buttons, revealing pale skin and bony ribs and a silver symbol tattooed on his chest: concentric circles, one inside the next, with lines or rays radiating out from the center.

“What is that?” Bellioc demanded. “What are you doing to him?”

The boy’s cry had turned to a rattle, and the rattle to another kind of cry that made Bell shudder. The child began to scream gibberish in a weirdly altered voice, at once sounding both full of phlegm and full of gravel.

“Ygnaiih … ygnaiih … thflthkh’ngha…”

“Jesus!” Bellioc gasped.

The tattoo on the boy’s chest was splitting along its radiating lines. The skin of his chest began to peel open of its own accord, like a flower blooming in stop motion photography. The petals of this flower folded back, curled in upon themselves, opening up a black maw within the boy. A great cavity that showed no organs inside. Too deep for the shallow confines of his slight child’s body. It was as though all space itself resided inside his frame.

“Yog-Sothoth,” the boy shrieked, still hiding his gaze from that dreaded seal. “Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah—e’yayayayaaaa…”

“Look!” Bell yelled, pointing at the void in the boy’s flesh. In that empty blackness of space they could see distant stars shining. But the stars were drawing nearer. They were like a shower of comets coming toward them, a fleet of glowing spheres or globes, iridescent, but the colors of that iridescence alien to their human eyes. As they neared, the spheres began to join with each other, become a great mass made of these glowing bubbles, like cells linking to form one immense body. And yet some few smaller, faster spheres shot on ahead, still seeking to reach the hole in the boy’s chest. To shoot through it.

And still the boy went on screaming, “Ngh’aaaaa…ngh’aaa… h’yuh…h’yuh…”

“Yog-Sothoth,” Kaddish breathed, and lunged into the room. No one tried to hold him back. Not even Bellioc.

Into that void, Kaddish tossed the stone disc in his hand.

The boy lifted his head at last, his eyes wide in horror and a rage that could show in no human child’s face, however deranged the mind behind it. The boy threw out his hands to grab a hold of Kaddish, but he danced back out of his reach.

The wide wound now began closing, the petals folding inward, once again concealing the infinity beyond. But one small glowing sphere was still hurtling at the portal, as if it thought it could make it through before the door of flesh closed completely.

Kaddish collided against Bell in his retreat. Bell staggered back a step, and when he recognized his own pistol rising in both of Kaddish’s hands, realized what his friend had done.

Kaddish fired at the boy’s head even as the globe impacted against the nearly closed flaps of skin. The dark purple energy bolt plummeted into the boy’s forehead just above one eyebrow, snapping his head back. His small skull was shattered, the wall behind him becoming splashed with a black mulch that couldn’t possibly be human brain matter.

The closing flaps of skin opened again briefly at the impact of the globe, letting in a blast of weirdly colored light. A single wide ray or beam, which struck Joshua Kaddish squarely in the chest and hurled him backwards out of the room, against the opposite wall of the corridor. And then the petals in the boy’s chest sealed completely, as if they had never existed, and his corpse slid into a sitting position against the wall, his open eyes fixed with that expression of malice that no child—no human—should be able to manifest.

Bell and the others went to Kaddish, but stopped themselves. Bellioc withdrew in horror. The uniformed officer whispered some half-prayer under his breath.

Kaddish was also slumped in a seated position, propped against the corridor wall. His entire front, his face, had been charred black, his eyes empty sockets steaming—as if the horror of what he had seen in that last moment had burned his eyes away utterly. And yet his lips had burned away also, and his blackened skeletal grin seemed hideously full of a sardonic humor. It seemed an apt expression for the man, in death.

Bell retrieved his gun from where it had been dropped by his friend, and carrying it in his fist, walked off down the corridor.

He asked to be let into the station’s vault, and was told by the officer on duty that he needed clearance. He pointed his gun at the young man’s eyes and softly repeated his request. It was granted.

John Bell took two steps into the vault of Precinct House 15, leveled his sidearm at the Shining Trapezohedron, and squeezed the trigger.

Black shards of crystal were scattered across the room.

««—»»

A transmission, weak and uncertain, was at last received from a colony on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. Contact had been lost with the colony over a half hour before.

Bell watched the transmission live on VT, a drink in his hand. A man filled the vidtank. His image was shot with static, but Bell could see that the man’s face was horribly swollen, covered in great blisters with a weirdly metallic sheen. He barely looked human, his eyes were fused shut, but the man was smiling nonetheless. And he was greeting his viewers with the words, “Ph-nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”

The newscaster returned to report that more transmissions were now being received, one by one, from the colonies on Jupiter’s icy moons, from Mars and from Earth. Bell was torn between hope and utter despair. He was tempted to turn the VT off before he saw what those transmissions contained.

He wondered if he and Kaddish by themselves had been responsible for blocking the Old Ones from coming, or if there had been other men and women, like themselves and Kate Redgrove, here on Oasis and on the Earth, who had been fighting their own desperate battles to prevent the dead, defeated gods from rising anew from their cosmic sepulchers. Were the doors now locked again—or merely shut? He watched, and waited for the news.

««—»»

Even now Bell didn’t know if his mutant companion was elderly or a youth, male or female. It pointed a scrawny arm through the rubble of the ruined structure in which the two of them hid, its great lidless eyes filled with fear at the sight of what it pointed at.

Across a lot heaped in junk and the exoskeletons of hovercars, a low flat-roofed building stood, its windows long since gone. The building was painted white, and thus, with its many gaping windows, resembled the fossil skull of some vast creature, with rows of black sockets. And an evil ghost of a brain, whispering inside.

Bell paid the mutant, barely noticed it as it crept away. The poor blighted creature would have elicited more interest and concern from him, if such beings weren’t so abundant here in the slum of Tin Town.

In his hands, Bell gripped a sawed-off pump shotgun with a banana clip full of crystal shot. In a shoulder holster was a ray blaster, in a hip holster a pistol loaded with solid projectiles, and in an ankle holster a little palm piece loaded with plasma capsules.

And in one of the pockets of his leather jacket he carried a small spray gun, loaded with a tube of blood red paint.